If until midnight of March 1 Kiev doesn’t unblock the railway tracks and roads leading to Donbass, blocked by radicals, enterprises under the jurisdiction of Ukraine will start being managed externally, and coal supplies to Ukraine will be stopped. This is the ultimatum with which the leaders of DPR and LPR presented Kiev.
The situation is very serious. It seems that Kiev will go through a blackout. The ultimatum is rough. To fulfill its conditions Kiev has a little more than a day. The heads of the People's Republics emphasize that the blockade organized by radicals without Kiev's intervention directly contradicts the Minsk agreements.
"We have to declare that if until midnight on Wednesday, March 1, 2017 the blockade is not lifted, we will introduce external management of all the enterprises of the Ukrainian jurisdiction, operating in the DPR and LPR. We will stop supplying Ukraine with coal. We have neither capacity nor a payment scheme for the coal supply".
The head of the DPR made an important remark. The lifting of the blockade as such is not the main thing. Donbass requires that the companies are registered on the territory of the Republics. Due to the blockade of the railway lines, Yenakiyevo Metallurgical Plant and some other enterprises stopped working. "These plants need to be operated, we need to think about the people. If on Wednesday, they are still not registered on our territory, they already come under our control. This applies to all enterprises of the Ukrainian jurisdiction".
The largest Ukrainian enterprises located in Donbass include, firstly, the group of companies "Metinvest". It unites the "Yenakiyevo Steel Plant" that's already stalled, JV "Metalen" LLC, "Makeyevka Metallurgical Plant" and the corporation "Industrial Union of Donbass", which consists of "Alchevskkoks", "Ekoenergia", and "Alchevsk Iron and Steel Works". The main shareholders of the "Metinvest" group are a Ukrainian businessman Rinat Akhmetov and one of the richest people of Ukraine Vadim Novinsky. Chairman of the Board of Directors of the "Industrial Union of Donbass" is an equally well known Ukrainian businessman Sergei Taruta. There has been no reaction from them to the ultimatum of the DPR and LPR. There has been no reaction from Kiev, either.
What does the phrase "external management" mean? Will Ukraine cope without coal from Donbass? The goal of Donbass is to redirect financial flows. Before the blockade, mines and metallurgists payed taxes to Kiev, but, at the same time, had an opportunity to sell their products on the territory of Ukraine, make profit and pay salaries to the people from this profit. Now, when the blockade deprived them of this opportunity, how can there be talk of taxes for Kiev? In the first place, Ukraine itself needs coal. Head of the Federation of Metallurgists of Ukraine Sergey Belenky spoke very emotionally about the situation. The country's losses grow as a snowball with each wagon that they don't let through the demarcation line. The budget will lose up to 3 billion hryvnia, 2.5 billion dollars of profit in foreign currency will not come into the country, we will need to cut 45 thousand jobs! Enterprises of Donbass will somehow survive without Ukraine. They will change all the production processes and redirect them to the markets of Russia and others countries. Now, we are waiting for the reaction from Kiev.
