Russia produces armoured vehicles with steel supplied from areas of Ukraine that it annexed to its territory in September 2022.
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More specifically, and according to a new article in the Ukrainian defence website DefenceExpress, by annexing parts of Ukraine, Russia has gained access to and control over major industrial infrastructure located in the regions of Donetsk, Lugansk and Zaporizhzhya.
Although some industrial plants were completely destroyed as a result of the war, such as the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol, other factories and mining operations survived almost intact or were repaired and are now operating normally. Many of these factories had also fallen into Russian hands during the 2014 clashes.
The Ukrainian site reports that Russia through the factories in the Zaporizhzhya region obtained various types of steel and by-products, which the Kremlin uses for the benefit of the Russian military.
More specifically, the media reports that in the summer of 2022 the Southern Mining and Metallurgical Complex (SMMC) located in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions started working for Russia, supplying steel to Moscow. This company consists of the following enterprises: Enakievsky Metallurgical Plant, Makivka Metallurgical Plant, Makeevkoks, Yasinovatsky Coke Plant, Komsomolsk Mining Plant, Alchevsk Metallurgical Plant and Stakhanov Ferroalloy Plant.
The group of these enterprises is currently owned by Yevgeny Yuchenko, however until 2021 these enterprises were owned by the Ukrainian oligarch Kurchenko. It is said that Russian entities helped Yuchenko to usurp the group from the Ukrainian tycoon.
To understand how important the contribution of this group of factories in Russia is, we will quote a very important fact. Means suggest that in 2022 alone the Alchevsk Metallurgical Plant sold products worth 22 billion rubles to the Russian defense company Uralvagonzavod. In the same year, the Enakievsky and Makivka smelters also started working for Moscow.
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Although official data suggest that this steel was used for the production of railway wagons, the Ukrainians doubt the validity of this information. Instead, they believe that these resources feed the Russian war machine, helping to produce armoured vehicles and other weapon systems and thus supporting the Russian offensive in Ukraine.
The cooperation between Moscow and the SSMC group continues to this day. A new bilateral agreement was signed on 17 November, which will become operational most likely in 2024.
