Russia's war against Ukraine not only expelled more than 2 million people from their homes, according to the United Nations, it also left thousands of relatives and friends without mobile communication.
The fighting has made service patchy in war-weary Donbas for four major Ukrainian telecom operators. They are Kyivstar and MTS-Ukraine, both run by Russian firms, and Astelit’s Life, majority-owned by Turkcell in minority partnership with Ukrainian billionaire Rinat Akhmetov, who also owns Ukrtelecom and its mobile operator TriMob.
Russia’s annexation of Crimea last year also forced these operators out of the peninsula, leaving Skype, Viber and FaceTime as favored ways to keep in touch.
Main network distortions in the east occur during clashes between the Ukrainian military and combined Russian-separatist forces, says Nadezhda Goriyuk, a native of Dzerzhynsk in Donetsk Oblast.
“As soon as shelling resumes it becomes difficult to get through to others,” she says. “During the fighting for Debaltseve I couldn’t get through to my friend in Myronivka (Donetsk Oblast) at all.”
Operators have up to 20 percent of infrastructure malfunctioning in the non-Ukrainian controlled territories in the east, citing equipment damage and interruptions in electricity supply as the major reasons. Lack of site access hinders their efforts to fix the problems.
Viktoria Ruban, MTS Ukraine communications manager, says that the company keeps bearing losses in the east, not in the number of subscribers, but in damage to infrastructure.
“Because of military operations our equipment is being broken on a regular basis,” Ruban says.
Sometimes, Kremlin-backed separatists cause the damage themselves.
“On Feb. 4, unidentified armed people entered the premises of Kyivstar’s technical office in Donetsk,” the company said in a news release. “They damaged the Donetsk core site and switched it off. It disabled normal functioning of a great number of Kyivstar base stations in Donetsk and Luhansk area. Soon Kyivstar specialists re-routed local traffic through alternative channels that helped renew the functioning of major part of mobile network segment.”
In March the mobile operator counted 430 incidents of technical damage to its mobile network in Donbas.
Similar attacks combined with company takeovers led to the cut-off of Ukrainian mobile operators in Crimea.
Gunmen entered the Kyivstar representative office in Simferopol and started to install unknown equipment in August 2014. Ukrtelecom was taken over in February under the aegis of a nationalization campaign. Both companies left soon after the attacks.
Russia’s 13-month-old war against Ukraine has been hard for mobile phone operators. MTS and Ukrtelecom lost subscribers, mainly due to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Kyivstar lost two percent of its revenue. Life, owned by Turkcell in minority partnership with billionaire Rinat Akhmetov, and third-ranked operator, grew clients and revenue.
MTS stopped providing service in Crimea in September, when local providers cut electricity supply to the operator. Afterward, a local operator started using frequencies that were previously used by MTS based on a spurious license received from Crimean authorities.
“It was a stalemate, when two licenses for the same frequency range were issued by two different authorities,” Ruban of MTS said. “At the same time, one company had the physical possibility to work and the other was deprived of it.”
MTS then decided to leave Crimea.
Currently, there are only Russian mobile operators covering Crimea, making calls to Ukrainian operators extremely expensive.
Phone numbers originating in Ukraine don’t work in Crimea and “Crimean-Russian” numbers are supported only up to Novooleksiyivka, 26 kilometers north of the Crimean border on the mainland, Tetyana Klymenko, an accountant from Yalta told the Kyiv Post.
Luckily, there have been no problems with Internet connection on the peninsula so far, at least for clientele of Ukrtelecom.
However, Crimeans couldn’t pay their Internet bills for several months during the turmoil inside the company. Once Crimean authorities took its units over in the peninsula under the “Krymtelecom” brand, payments were accepted again in rubles.
Ukrtelecom has been trying to restore justice through local courts since February, achieving no real success.
MTS Ukraine, whose parent company is Russian, was the only operator that sold its assets before “nationalization.” Astelit’s Life brand wrote off its losses, but didn’t provide an amount, while Kyivstar wrote off equipment worth $13 million. MTS sold its assets in Crimea through an auction in October for $13.9 million.
Kyiv Post staff writer Bozhena Sheremeta contributed to this report.
Kyiv Post staff writer Olena Gordiienko can be reached at [email protected].
