Four years after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the European Sectoral Social Dialogue Committee on Extractive Industries met Mykhailo Volynets today to learn more about the difficulties faced by coal miners working under the shadow of armed conflict. As well as being a sitting member of the Batkivshchyna party in the Verkhovna Rada, PD Volynets heads the Independent Trade Union of Miners of Ukraine (NPGU) and chairs the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine (KVPU). He represents workers at DTEK, the country’s largest private energy company and a member of EURACOAL.
Since the start of its invasion, Russia has attacked DTEK’s thermal power plants more than 220 times, with damage or destruction reported at each site. The company has lost hundreds of men to the war. On 1 February 2026, twelve employees of PJSC “DTEK Pavlohradvuhillia” were killed and sixteen others injured when returning home after a shift at a mine in the Dnipropetrovsk region. Their bus had been targeted by a Russian drone near the town of Ternivka.
Alongside such strikes, power-grid infrastructure has also been repeatedly targeted. As a result, around 1400 substations and other distribution assets were damaged, as well as about 9000 power lines. This last winter has been the worst endured by Ukrainian citizens. Despite Russia’s energy terror, DTEK is working around the clock to restore its power stations and repair electricity grids in Odesa, Kyiv and its region, Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk.
NPGU and KVPU, as the voice of Ukrainian workers, in particular miners, metallurgists, energy workers, teachers, doctors, entrepreneurs and others, drew attention to the urgent need to take decisive measures both to protect Ukraine and to deter the aggressor state, Russia, from attempting to rewrite international law and redraw the map of modern Europe.
At the meeting, representatives of industriAll, EURACOAL, APEP, Euromines, Aggregates Europe and IMA Europe agreed a joint statement in which they express their strong solidarity with the workers of Ukraine’s extractive industries in these exceptionally difficult times.
header image credit: Armed Forces of Ukraine