Russian Coal Miners Go On Strike For Unpaid Wages Walkout In Dead Of Winter Could Cause Budgetary Chaos

More than a million Russian and Ukrainian coal miners went on strike Thursday in a wave of anger that could lead to budgetary chaos and affect Russia’s presidential election campaign.

From Ukraine’s coal-rich Donbass region to eastern Siberia, miners were demanding hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid wages and protesting government neglect of state-owned mines.

“We’ll make them respect us and teach them a lesson,” Ivan Mokhnachuk, deputy head of Russia’s Union of Coal Industry Workers, said in Moscow.

The walkout comes in the dead of winter in countries heavily reliant on coal. In eastern Siberia, coal is the only energy source, and some regions have only about a week’s reserves.

In many areas, however, Russia has other energy sources. Gas and oil are both used far more than coal in Russia, and with the use of gas on the rise, it would be the apparent fallback if the strike stretches on. Hydropower and nuclear power account for a much smaller percentage of the power supply.

The strike’s immediate impact is expected to be political.

Coal mining is still a state-owned industry in both of the former Soviet republics. Workers in other cashstarved state sectors also are angry, and say they have lost faith in government promises to address the problems of unpaid wages and payments to industry.

“The miners could start a chain reaction that would bring about an emergency situation in the country,” said Alexander Zhukov, a moderate lawmaker and deputy chairman of the budget committee in Russia’s lower house of parliament.

“It’s enough to make a concession to one industry, and others will come for the same,” he said.

Thousands of men trudged off the night shift in the predawn darkness in the Kuznetsk Basin region of western Siberia, a scene repeated at dozens of mines across Russia.

“I have to go to pensioners and borrow money to buy bread and milk for my family,” Ravil Shafigulin said outside a mine near Novokuznetsk, 1,800 miles east of Moscow, his face grimy from the night shift.

Union officials said about a million of a total 1.2 million miners went on strike in Ukraine, along with about 500,000 Russian miners - a majority of the workforce in Russia’s seven coal-mining regions.