You're reading: Donbas resumes shipping coal to Ukraine

DONETSK/KYIV - The self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) has resumed coal supplies to Ukraine.

“At 5 p.m. today, we completely resumed coal supplies to Ukraine,” so-called ‘DPR Transport Minister’ Semyon Kuzmenko told Interfax on Wednesday.

DTEK chief for public communications Iryna Miliutina, in turn, confirmed that the shipments from the military operation zone in eastern Ukraine have been enabled.

“The anthracite coal from our coal mines in Donbas was accepted for transportation. For the time being, it hasn’t crossed the line of demarcation. But the loading has already started,” she wrote on her Facebook page.

For now, it only concerns the coal extracting facilities located in the Donetsk region, she said.

Earlier on Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered that the government resume coal supplies to Ukraine in response to Kyiv resuming electricity flow to Crimea.

“They [Ukraine] might only have got only one line up and running, but it’s still one line [of power transmission]. It is necessary to resume coal supplies,” Putin said at a meeting with government members.

However, Putin emphasized that “we can’t have a situation where we have fully energized [Crimea] by using four energy grids, totally covering everything what used to be supplied to Crimea by Ukraine, while having the ongoing contracts intact on the power supplies from Ukraine”. “As far as I know, we haven’t got such contracts now but we need to look and make sure that nobody’s in an awkward situation and everybody is warned in advance that from such and such time we won’t be needing electricity at all,” Putin said, adding that “actually, by and large, we don’t even need it now if we are using mobile generators”.

However, “since our Ukrainian partners have resumed [the power supplies], then okay, we’ll have them, and in reply we’ll resume coal shipments to Ukraine,” Putin said.