KLESIV, Ukraine – For the residents of Klesiv, a town of 5,490 people some 300 kilometers west of Kyiv in Rivne Oblast, local amber miners are respected members of the business community.
But they still run an illegal business, part that might be worth up to $500 million a year, employing thousands of people, by some estimates.
Money from harvesting amber, a prized gemstone formed from fossilized tree resin, the miners have paid for a heating system for the local school, built a church, and bought a local hospital its only ambulance.
Next up: building a park, organizing a garbage pickup service and building a new road.
For that to happen, politicians would have to stop viewing the amber miners as armed criminals.
On March 30, a riot between miners and police sent 10 officers to the hospital. The National Guard came in to restore order.
The riots stopped after newly appointed Rivne Oblast Police Chief Serhiy Knyazev came to Klesiv in mid-April and reached a fragile peace with the miners.
They are focusing on their political demands and have stopped work until they achieve their goals.
“The law says that mineral resources belong to the people. But in fact the police and oligarchs own them,” says Oleksandr Vasiliyev, a former amber miner and now a deputy in Rivne Oblast Council. “And we’re like a bone in their throat.”
Amber rush
The residents of Rivne, Zhytomyr and Volyn Oblasts in northwestern Ukraine have always known there was amber, formed from ancient pine tree resin, in the soils of their forests. But it was only in the early 1980s that Soviet geological expeditions discovered massive deposits, estimated at about 1,600 tons.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, state-regulated amber mining almost came to a complete stop, replaced by private enterprises run by local villagers. The same people who, as children, helped state geologists collect amber suddenly made good money from illegal sales.
Individual mining is banned by Ukrainian law and possible only under a commercial license. But from the late 1980s, traders from neighboring Poland and the Baltic states started arriving in Ukraine to buy amber.
They taught the local villagers how to mine for the gem using water pumps and nets instead of spades.
“They taught us the real value of amber,” said Volodymyr Okhmanyuk, 45, who has been mining amber for more than
20 years.
Amber pendants made at Burshtyn Ukrayiny state-owned jewelry company. (Oksana Grytsenko)
The more efficient pump method of mining attracted more contractors but also brought to massive deforestation of the areas. The man-made pits in the ground, dug out by amber miners, damage the tree roots. The miners also chop the trees to clear some space for their work, creating miles of a Moon-like landscape instead of the forest.
Raw amber lies in some five to seven meters below the ground. While digging amber, the miners look for an orange color of a soil, a usual sign of amber deposits located nearby.
During the chaotic 1990s, Ukrainian amber miners bartered their gems for goods. While an average monthly salary was only $17 in early 1990s in Ukraine, a kilogram of quality amber sold for $200, Okhmanyuk remembers. It was a day’s work for a lucky miner.
Police soon got in on the action, charging each team $10 a day to “protect them” from criminal gangs and state officials. When world prices shot up, with a kilogram now going for $4,500 on the Ukrainian black market, the price of police protection rose as well — to $600-$800 as a daily fee for a team of miners.
Amber is used in jewelry and also in Chinese medicine. The booming demand for it in China and some Arab countries provoked a hike of amber prices over the last decade with the peak reached in 2014. It attracted thousands of residents of Rivne Oblast, including children,
to dig amber instead of their usual work.
After the EuroMaidan Revolution many of amber miners decided to no longer pay the bribes and demand the state to grant them individual licenses.
Amber wars
On May 9, 2014, Volodymyr Prodyvus, a former lawmaker of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, arrived in a forest near Sarny in Rivne Oblast, some 25 kilometers from Klesiv, to talk to local amber miners about his terms for providing “protection.” Their meeting didn’t go well.
A YouTube video of it shows a man who looks like Prodyvus arriving to the meeting with some 100 young men by his side, some armed with Kalashnikov guns. Police were present, but did nothing when some of the visitors opened fire against the locals, injuring three of them.
The locals called for reinforcement from nearby villages. Some 1,000 people surrounded the attackers, smashed their cars with wooden sticks, captured 15 of them and forced the others to flee.
A clash between the armed gangsters and illegal amber miners on May 9, 2014, in the forest in Rivne Oblast.
Prodyvus, who now lives in Kyiv, refused to comment for this story. The case is being heard at a local court, but the amber miners say they have little hope anyone will be brought to justice for the shooting.
But the victory against the racketeers gave the miners the confidence to start fighting for their rights. They organized a vigilante team in Klesiv, registered a non-government organization named Polisya, and chose Vasiliyev as their head.
On May 14, 2014, Vasiliyev came to the meeting of the Rivne Oblast Council and called out several officials who he said were soliciting bribes from the miners.
Two months after that, someone threw a grenade into the window of Vasiliyev’s house. But he survived and later in the year was elected to the regional council on the Radical Party list, and started lobbying a bill to legalize amber mining.
“Yes, I was paying (the police) until 2014. But now I’m fighting to make (amber mining) legal,” says Vasiliyev, who wears a tracksuit and a thick golden chain around his neck. “If it doesn’t become legal, there will be more shooting.”
The next violent incident followed on Sept. 28, 2015, when several groups of amber miners and the police clashed in the forest near the town of Manevychi in Volyn Oblast, some 100 kilometers to the west of Klesiv. It ended with more than 100 people being arrested.
Amber miners in Sarny and Klesiv agreed with the authorities to stop mining until a law legalizing their work is adopted. The law was passed by parliament at first reading on April 23, 2015,but never made it to the second and final reading.
The miners started protesting again in spring 2015 because the police allegedly continued to allow some groups to work under their protection, while stopping those who refused to pay them bribes.
The latest clash took place on March 30, when about a hundred police officers faced several hundred angry locals, including women and children, in Klesiv. The crowd started throwing stones at the police, who opened fire, wounding a 15-year-old boy with rubber bullets.
The National Guard was deployed to the region in the following days, and checkpoints were set up on the main roads
to prevent amber mining. But the region’s new top cop Knyazev admits the police don’t have enough people to control the locals involved in digging amber.
The armed policemen stand next to the sacks with the illegally extracted amber by the office of Minister of Interior Affairs in Kyiv on Aug. 4, 2015. (UNIAN)
Amber mafia
Knyazev said he was shocked by the scale of the illegal mining in some villages, where even schoolchildren were involved in digging for amber and where even some roads had been destroyed by the pumps.
Many locals, Knyazev said, accused police officers of protecting the illegal mining operations. Based on the complaints and media investigations, he suspended a senior police officer and chief of police in Sarny district, Major Ihor Kharytonov.
“The complaints very often prove justified,” Knyazev said. Vasiliyev and his group told the Kyiv Post about “three majors” in the police who had created and maintained the corrupt system of “tickets” in their region.
Knyazev said the police had started an internal investigation into the “three majors.” He said that two of them were the Sarny top police officers that he suspended, and that he knows the name of the third one.
But on May 6, soon after the Kyiv Post’s conversation with Knyazev, Rivne Oblast Court of Appeals reinstated Kharytonov in his post.
Amber laws
In a brightly lit, spacious room at Burshtyn Ukrayiny (Amber of Ukraine), a state enterprise in Rivne, a group of women are carefully selecting amber beads and stringing them into long necklaces. There is a gloomy atmosphere – layoffs are expected at the enterprise.
Burshtyn Ukrayiny is one of only two firms that have licenses to mine and sell amber in Ukraine – the other one is a private firm called Sonyachne Remeslo (Sun Trade).
In late April, 2016, a jewelry worker strings together amber beads to make a necklace at Burshtyn Ukrainy, a state-owned company based in Rivne. (Oksana Grytsenko)
Amber jewlry made at Burshtyn Ukrainy, a state-owned company based in Rivne. (Oksana Grytsenko)
Workers of Burshtyn Ukrayiny state company make an amber jewelry in Rivne city in late April, 2016.
But Burshtyn Ukrayiny stopped mining in June 2015, bogged down by the paperwork needed to get another land plot for
extraction. The company has since had to buy confiscated amber from the Finance Ministry’s state repository to keep its jewelry workshop supplied. The amber is
confiscated from illegal miners. “Getting every next document was like entering another circle of hell for us,” Dmytro Tiaglii, company’s
director, told the Kyiv Post.
An excavator used for a legal amber extraction stands unused at the amber mining site of Burshtyn Ukrainy company by Klesiv town in Rivne Oblast in late April 2016. The state company, which has a permit for amber mining, can’t do any works over problems with paperwork. (Oksana Grytsenko)
The current legislation surrounding amber mining effectively prevents his business from operating, Tiaglii
believes. Vasiliyev agrees. So his NGO Polisya has drafted two bills — On Artisanal Mining and On Amber Mining and Trading — to solve the problem.
The first bill legalizes amber mining as a profession in Ukraine, along with amber mining teams.
The second one divides amber businessmen into deposit managers and miners, and launches an amber exchange as the only place to legally trade amber. The deposit manager would be responsible for returning amber mining areas to their natural state once mining is over.
But Ihor Tymoshenko, the head of the Economic and Trade department of Rivne Oblast State Administration, doubts these laws will solve all of the amber miners’ present problems.
The pump method used by the miners can never be legalized, because it is too damaging to the environment, Tymoshenko said. The pump method is lucrative, but it turns the areas of forests into wastelands.
“The miners want to be legalized with their pumps. That won’t happen,” he said.
There’s little chance that miners will drop the lucrative mining method in a region where the monthly salary averages $138.
Klesiv’s amber miners say their patience is already wearing thin.
“They’re not allowing us to work. We will fight more if this goes on,” said one miner, Viktor Krychan.
“It will be another Donbas,” he said.
