Now the issue is, or at least was before the war, kopanki, or small illegal mines. In difficult times, he explained, locals had always taken to a bit of DIY cottage mining to make ends meet or simply to heat their homes. With coal so close to the surface it is not hard to do. But the last fifteen years or so have seen a complete transformation of this into a multimillion-dollar criminal industry. In 2012 Ukraine produced 61.1 million metric tons of thermal coal, which is the type usually used in power plants. But examinations of the amount of coal moved by Ukraine’s railways showed that much
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