Women workers keep Ukraine mines running as war continues

By Roy Landersen
February 10, 2025
Tetiana Medvedenko, left, and Iryna Ostanko, both union members at coal mine near Ternivka, Ukraine. When men there volunteered for the army, for the first time women were hired.
Michael Robinson Chávez/NPRTetiana Medvedenko, left, and Iryna Ostanko, both union members at coal mine near Ternivka, Ukraine. When men there volunteered for the army, for the first time women were hired.

As the third anniversary of Moscow’s Feb. 24, 2022, murderous war against Ukraine approaches, more and more of the country’s men have been called on to defend their country’s sovereignty, arms in hand. This has meant substantially greater numbers of women are drawn into nontraditional jobs in coal mines, steel mills and other basic industry.

“I used to work as an accountant,” coal miner Iryna Ostanko, 36, told NPR for a story run Jan. 7, “and then this job, which pays way better, opened up.” She works day shift at the coal mine in Ternivka, a small city in eastern Ukraine’s coal country. Her miner friend, Tetiana Medvedenko, 44, was a housewife until recently.

Medvedenko’s husband, who also works at the mine, “wasn’t thrilled that I took this job,” she said, but now he “puts up with it.” Ostanko’s father, a retired miner, was glad to hear she had got such a good job. The mine is owned by DTEK, one of a number of industrial companies run by one of Ukraine’s richest people, Rinat Akhmetov.

The two women, both machine operators working 870 feet underground, symbolize how much the war has changed Ukraine’s workforce, especially in heavy industry. For years, a decades-old law prohibited women from working in “harmful and dangerous conditions,” including underground jobs in the mines. Within a few months after Putin’s invasion, Kyiv lifted the ban as the shortage of workers grew.

Many male miners volunteered for the army at the onset of war, with more joining or being conscripted since. Steel plants and coal mines faced growing shortages of workers and production fell sharply.

Today hundreds of women work underground, as coal bosses try to keep up wartime production.

Moscow’s intensified drive to seize the entire Donbas, the heart of Ukraine’s historical industrial region, is putting significant pressure on Ukraine’s coal supply, essential for the country’s steel works and export trade.

Russian forces keep pressing daily attacks on the coal mining center of Pokrovsk, 100 miles east of Ternivka. This mine is run by Metinvest, another arm of Akhmetov’s empire. In September, several airstrikes hit another mine, killing four women working above ground.

After many miners joined the fighting or left for safer jobs, 1,000 of the most resilient and dedicated workers kept the mine operating, Ukraine’s last internal source of coking coal. One entrance to the mine was recently closed as Russian forces got closer. Workers had to use another one, then travel 6 miles through underground tunnels for two hours to get to the coal face. They rode the coal conveyors out again at shift’s end.

On Dec. 20, the shaft, with Ukraine’s last supply of coking coal, was blown up to prevent advancing Russian troops from using it.

The mine in Ternivka is still operating. When Medvedenko walks to work, she passes a giant DTEK billboard celebrating “the new face of Ukraine’s coal miners.” One of the faces is hers.