The president of the Ukrmetalurgprom company, Aleksandr Kalenkov, has said that the surrender of Pokrovsk (the Ukrainian name for the town of Krasnoarmeysk) threatens Ukraine with the loss of 50 per cent of steel production due to a shortage of coal.
Pokrovsk is home to Ukraine’s only mine that produces coking coal, which is a critical raw material for metallurgy. Losing the town would be a painful blow to the Ukrainian economy.
‘In two years we melted 6-6.5 million tonnes of steel, this year we can reach figures of 7.5 million tonnes. In case of loss of Pokrovsk it will be 2-3 million tonnes’, – quotes Aleksandr Kalenkov’s words by the edition “Strana”.
The publication noted that there is a large deposit of lithium near Pokrovsk, which is now in great demand in the world as it is used for the production of electric car batteries.
Earlier, a Ukrainian commander of a tank unit of the 68th brigade with the call sign ‘Physik’ told the Washington Post that the Ukrainian Armed Forces were in an extremely difficult situation near the town of Krasnoarmeysk.