EUROPE

A Silver Lining Coated in Coal Dust in Eastern Ukraine

By ANDREW E. KRAMERJAN. 31, 2015

SNIZHNE, Ukraine — Outside Vladimir Moroz’s snug little brick home, winter and hardship grip war-stricken eastern Ukraine. Money is scarce, the store shelves are bare and an icy wind whips over the snowy steppe.

Inside, a retired miner smiles broadly. He peels off his gloves and flexes his cold-stiffened hands over a stove and his prized, glowing, once-illicit source of warmth: backyard coal dug from dangerous, unregulated mines.

In a region plagued by upheaval and misfortune, coal miners who take pride in their grit and self-reliance have found at least one silver lining in changes sweeping over their land. The rebel government has decided to allow private mining, a long-stigmatized, legally proscribed but nevertheless widespread practice in Ukraine’s east.

“I have my own potatoes, my own carrots, my own cabbage and my own mine,” Mr. Moroz said, referring to the dank pit under a shed out back. “This is how we live.”

Deep in the backcountry of Donbass, as the rebellious region of eastern Ukraine is known, rich seams of coal undulate just under the hills. In places, kicking back the topsoil with a boot reveals glistening layers of coal, as mysterious and alluring to these miners as onyx.

Mr. Moroz struggles to recall when he was last paid a pension; maybe it was August. Relatives have fled, food is scarce and danger is never far away.

But coal, at least, is plentiful. So long as Ukraine’s legions of small-time miners pay taxes to the rebel government, the Donetsk People’s Republic, they are free to dig wherever and however they see fit.

Private mines popped up across Donbass as the Soviet era faded into the past, and now they are everywhere. Amid the oak groves and wild rose bushes carpeting the hills, every few hundred feet, the snowdrifts cave in on a homemade pit into the abyss: It is the heart of the once-illegal coal mining country.

“We are all miners,” Mr. Moroz said of the community’s response to the poverty of the post-Soviet period. “All we knew how to do was dig.”

Miners, of course, always knew that the coal seams did not end at the edge of the state-owned mines. But Soviet mines gave employees truckloads of thermal coal as a perquisite, so nobody bothered to dig in their yards.

In the late 1990s when this practice stopped, private mines, called kopenki, appeared like craters over the landscape, filling an economic niche and akin to illegal whiskey stills in the Appalachians. Everybody knew they existed, the local police took a cut and strangers were never allowed anywhere close. Now, in a populist move, the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic has lifted the prohibition.

The legalization of backyard mining has alarmed coal mining officials in Ukraine, who view it as a dangerous practice that rolls back a century of efforts to improve and lengthen the lives of coal miners.

“They are a level of magnitude more dangerous” than commercial mines, Valery N. Mamchenko, deputy chairman of the Union of Ukrainian Coal Miners, said in a telephone interview from Kiev. “This is scary, physically exhausting work no different from mining in the 19th century.”

Boris Litvinov, a member of the Parliament of the Donetsk People’s Republic, said the rebel leadership certainly understood the dangers of unregulated mining. But he said a greater concern was putting an end to the corruption and organized crime that popped up around an industry impossible to eradicate anyway, given the coal seams’ proximity to the surface.

“When tragic accidents happen, and these are quite frequent, of course nobody ever bothers to dig anybody out,” Mr. Litvinov said of the drawbacks of legalization. “They just bulldoze over the surface and give some money to the families so they don’t raise a scandal.

“But to close hundreds of illegal mines — and there are hundreds of them — we would need to find other jobs,” he said, and those jobs just do not exist in wartime and isolation.

Before the war, illegal mines yielded an estimated five million tons of Ukraine’s total coal output of 80 million tons and employed thousands of men in small, remote and economically depressed towns along the Russian border.

“At least they let us work openly,” said the foreman of one midsize operation that was burrowing into a snowy hillside on a recent day. He offered only his first name, Aleksei, out of an abundance of caution.

That, of course, does not make the work any easier or less terrifying.

“Would you like to go inside?” Aleksei offered, grinning, flicking a cigarette butt in the direction of a tiny black hole in the hill.

About a yard-square, slickened with an icy gruel of mud and coal dust and propped up with scrap timber, the shaft of Aleksei’s mine slants 600 feet into the hillside before reaching the coal face. For these miners, the daily commute is the equivalent of crawling in the mud under a table the length of two football fields.

There, with little chance of survival in the event of a cave-in, two sooty-faced men with a jackhammer slice off slabs of inky black, fresh, high-grade anthracite coal.

The men work eight-hour shifts for about $15 a day, chipping coal, sending it up the shaft in a bathtub bolted to a cable attached to a pulley.

Aleksei broke ground on this mine in June, as all semblance of mining regulation broke down with the onset of war. He sells the coal to local electrical power stations, and the four men of the crew take a share to heat their homes.

Before the revolution in the east, he said, corrupt police officers “took bribes like it was their last day on earth.” After the change of government, he said, the miners walked right into the tax office and said, “ ‘We want to mine,’ and they said, ‘Fine, but pay your tax.’ ”

As another bathtub of coal clattered to the surface, Aleksei pointed out that he had nothing to hide. “We’re a small business now,” he said. “We’re legal.”

Outside Ukraine this town is known, if at all, as the spot where, NATO analysts say, pro-Russian rebels launched an antiaircraft rocket that brought down a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet last summer. The front is now west of here, but in the summer, artillery duels were fought in and around the town, and locals took refuge in the mines.

Some of the mines, like Aleksei’s, are mini-businesses. Others are family affairs, like the shaft Mr. Moroz sunk with a pick and shovel into his garden and shares with a neighbor.

He is happy the business has come above ground, but he still sees drawbacks. “At the state mine, you get paid for black lung,” he said. “Out here, you get nothing.”