Ukraine produced no steel at all last month, Oleksandr Kalenkov, president of the Ukrmetalurgprom association, says, according to Ukrainian Radio. Russian missiles have destroyed the blast furnaces at its plants, stopping an industry that ran for more than 150 years.
Over its independence, Ukraine smelted more than 42 million tons of steel a year, more than a third of what the entire 27-nation EU produces now. That industry is now in catastrophe: before the war, it accounted for over a third of Ukraine’s exports and up to 12% of GDP, and a month of zero output tears a hole in the entire economy.
“What is happening now is not just a hard or critical situation. It is a tragic situation when an industry more than 150 years old produced zero steel last month,” Kalenkov says.
The collapse is the end of a long descent, and 15 years ago the sector earned half the country’s foreign currency, Kalenkov notes.
Steel remains Ukraine’s second-largest foreign-currency earner, employing more than 70,000 people directly and paying close to $1 billion a year in taxes.
A pillar knocked out piece by piece since 2014
The war has chipped at the industry for more than a decade. Ukraine lost about a third of its capacity in 2014, including almost all its coking-coal mines and finally the Pokrovske mine, and in 2022 it lost the Mariupol production site, another 40% of what it then made, he recalls.
Even the plants left on government-controlled land have worked in survival mode since.
In 2021, the last year before the invasion, the mining and metals complex still accounted for more than a third of all exports and accounted for up to 12% of GDP, rising above 40% of regional output in Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts.
The strikes that finished the furnaces
The decisive blow came from the air. Since August, a huge number of missiles, both ballistic and cruise, have targeted the plants, and practically all the blast furnaces still working were destroyed, he adds.
Ukraine’s largest steelworks, ArcelorMittal Kryvyi Rih, began a cold shutdown after four Russian attacks that killed six workers and halted primary steel production, while September output fell 4.7-fold year on year to 131,000 tons
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