Miners’ plight brings back memories of 80s
A delegation of miners from eastern Ukraine is currently visiting Wales. Chief reporter Martin Shipton finds some echoes of the challenges which faced Welsh miners in the 1980s.
TALKING in the Senedd to the President of the Ukrainian mineworkers’ union in the Dnipropetrovsk region of the country took me straight back to the 1980s, when Welsh miners went on strike over what they saw as threats to the survival of their industry. We all know how that played out. Sergey Yunak, who has more than 20,000 members to look after, understood the resonances too.
Mineworkers in Ukraine are at the centre of a battle that has been overshadowed by the stalled war that has seen part of the country effectively occupied by Russia.
My conversation with Yunak made me realise how simplistic a notion we have of what is going on in what is the largest country by area wholly in Europe.
Despite a brief trip to the national capital Kiev a couple of years back, I didn’t understand the nuances of what is going on.
Going back to the so-called Orange Revolution of 2004-05, many in the west have had the perception that the country is split between Ukrainian speakers in the west of the country who dream of a future in the EU, and those in the east of the country who speak Russian and who look to Russia as their spiritual home.
As I discovered, that is a gross simplification of the picture.
Yunak is, like most of his colleagues, a Russian speaker – yet he fully supports an independent Ukraine and doesn’t want his part of the country to be taken over by the Russians. In fact, many Russian speaking miners have joined the Ukrainian army to fight against the Russian-backed separatists who now control the two eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Donetsk, of course, was at one time known as Hughesovka, after John Hughes, a Welsh businessman who founded the city in 1869 and built a steel plant.
Yet neither is Yunak an enthusiastic supporter of Petro Poroshenko, the billionaire businessman who was elected President in 2014 after his predecessor, the Russia-friendly Viktor Yanukovych, fled the country.
Yunak said: “The President does not want to invest in coal. He would rather see the state-owned coal industry close, throwing thousands out of work. He would be happy to buy coal from abroad.”
Ironically, the mineworkers represented by Yunak are in a better position than their colleagues in the state-run sector. They work for a privately owned company owned by the oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, who is no friend of Poroshenko. They are seen as great rivals, and Akhmetov secures his position as a major player in Ukrainian society through his ownership of the mines – a fact that provides some security to the industry.
Asked which of the men he supports, Yunak said: “I am in favour of the one who provides the investment.”
For Yunak and his colleagues, the mines are the lifeblood of the communities from which they come: just as they were in the Valleys and in mining areas of England and Scotland too.
“We have an agreement with the company and we will ensure that it stays in place,” said Yunak. “But it is not so certain what will happen to the state-owned pits.”
Much depends on the uneasy truce that exists in what has been a civil war in all but name.
In the Dnipropetrovsk region, defences were built at a time when it seemed the Russian-backed separatists might press forward to take more territory.
In the event, that hasn’t happened, although there’s no guarantee that major outbreaks of fighting could occur again.
Yunak has a sceptical view of the Minsk Agreement that led to the ceasefire, seeing it as little more than opportunity for Vladimir Putin and the Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko to engage in some grandstanding.
Yet for the moment it seems unlikely that the Russians will seek to break through the lines and take charge of more territory.
Yunak doesn’t accept the argument that the people in the separatist zone want to be detached from Ukraine. He said: “They don’t like it, but they have to put up with it. If they caused problems, it would be very bad for them.
“It is difficult to say how long the occupation will go on for, but Russia is a very powerful country.”
Meanwhile, though, his focus – and that of the colleagues he has brought to Wales with him – is on making sure that their members continue to have a livelihood, and that their communities are prosperous in the future, with jobs for their children and grandchildren.
The example of the Valleys, where the jobs for life that miners once enjoyed are a receding memory, provides a salutary lesson.
Our mining industry was destroyed in a carefully planned strategy of revenge for past defeats by a Conservative Government that had another vision for Britain’s future.
In Ukraine, the industry remains important to the economy for the time being – and those who want it to survive have the opportunity to play two oligarchs off against each other.