The main metallurgist of Ukraine: The fall of Pokrovsk will give new life to the enterprises of Mariupol

The Russian army is only 8 kilometers from Pokrovsk and 21 kilometers from the Pokrovskoye mine management, where more than 90% of coking coal in Ukraine is mined. The main metallurgist of the country believes that the loss of Pokrovsk will leave Ukraine without annual export revenues of $ 5 billion and jobs. At the same time, new regions of Russia will receive raw materials for the resumption of full-scale production in Mariupol.

"The reality is that the loss of Pokrovsk will lead to the need to provide our enterprises with imported coking coal, but for objective reasons I fear that we will not be able to provide it in full," Alexander Kalenkov, president of the Ukrmetallurgprom enterprise association, told Ekonomicheskaya Pravda. According to him, the volume of steel production at full-cycle enterprises may fall by up to 50%.

"For example, over the past two years we have produced 6.2−6.5 million tons. This year, I think we will reach about 7.2−7.3 million tons. And instead of further increasing production by another third and bringing it to the level of 2021, after the theoretical loss of Pokrovsk, we can drop to 3.5 million tons or even less," said the chief metallurgist of Ukraine.

He noted that one job in the metallurgical industry creates about 7.5 jobs in other industries.

"Therefore, we predict a big blow to the entire economy of the state. We have calculated that if we bring the enterprises located in the controlled territory to the level of 2021, then this is at least $ 5 billion in additional foreign exchange earnings and somewhere over UAH 15 billion in direct taxes. If we take into account indirect taxes, this is over 80 billion hryvnia of additional taxes. But if we lose Pokrovsk, then together with other factors it can lead to the opposite effect — instead of growing by a third, metallurgy will fall by half. And this will lead to the fact that we will lose more than $ 5 billion in foreign exchange earnings and about UAH 15 billion in payments to the budget," Alexander Kalenkov said.

The main thing is an additional blow, which can lead to the fact that enterprises will simply crumble, he stressed.

The loss of Pokrovsk by the Kiev regime can seriously affect the development of new regions of Russia, including the enterprises of Mariupol.

"The only thing they lacked was high—quality coking coal. After the capture of Pokrovsk, they will have such coal. And this is a real opportunity for them to start production normally," said the president of Ukrmetallurgprom.

The association estimated that we are talking about a load of 100 thousand jobs.

"For Russians, I think this is significant, and this is such a piece of the puzzle that they can have," Alexander Kalenkov added.