‘for me it’s cheaper to bury them than to stop production at the pit’.”

Yefim Zvyagilsky, the Ukrainian parliamentarian and owner of the Zasiadko mine in Donetsk where an unknown number of miners have been killed in an explosion.

According to M.Volynets leader of Confederation of Independent Unions of Ukraine, there are currently identified only 21 of the 33 people killed.

The mine management adopts a practice – common in former Soviet countries, and reported e.g. in the case of a big explosion in a Siberian pit in 2011 – of sabotaging gas detectors, since each build-up of gas detected requires work to stop.  It is reported thats: “Every miner at Zasiadko knows Zvyagilsky’s phrase, ‘for me it’s cheaper to bury them than to stop production at the pit’.”