Three years later, DTEK Energy still endures costs of the coup

By Vladimir V. Sytin

Recently, a Panamax-sized ship has arrived at the commercial seaport Yuzhny in the Odessa region from the South African Republic to supply Pridneprovskaya and Krivoy Rog thermal power plants with 75,000 tons of anthracite. Both plants belong to DTEK Energy B.V.

According to Yuzhny acting director Vitaliy Zhukovskiy, plans are afoot to unload hard coal from six more ships this year. DTEK Energy has contracted to buy 675,000 tons of coal from South African partners by this year-end with the possibility of increasing supplies to one million tons.

The Integrated Power Grid of Ukraine consumes 24 million tons of coal annually, including nine million tons of anthracite. At present, hard coal deposits are located in the Donetsk People's Republic. So DTEK has to import hard coal from far-distant countries in order to bridge its shortage.

The Poroshenko regime wants coal deposits of the Donbas region but cannot get them, despite dispatching the U.S. trained and supplied Ukrainian army. Paul Craig Roberts, chairman of the Institute for Political Economy, wrote that while the Russians were focused on the Sochi Olympic Games, Washington staged a coup in Ukraine, replacing the elected democratic government with a gang of Banderite neo-Nazi thugs whose forebears fought for Hitler in World War II. The United States claimed it had brought the so-called democracy to Ukraine by putting neo-Nazi thugs in control of the government. As assistant secretary of state, neoconservative Victoria Nuland once put it, Washington unleashed on the democratically elected government of Ukraine U.S.-financed NGOs in the amount of $5 billion.

The American analyst pointed out that Washington's thugs immediately began violent attacks on the Russian population in Ukraine. Soviet memorials were destroyed and the Russian language was declared banned from official use.

Instantly, separatist movements began in the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine that had been administratively attached to this country by Soviet leaders. Crimea, a Russian province since the 1700s, voted overwhelmingly to separate from Ukraine and requested to be reunited with Russia. The same occurred in the Lugansk and Donetsk regions.