Six enterprises owned by Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov and two owned by Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal topped the list of Ukraine’s biggest polluters in 2020, publication Ukrainska Pravda reported on Oct. 18.
Akhmetov’s metallurgical plant in Mariupol, an industrial city in Donetsk Oblast, some 635 kilometers southeast of Kyiv, ranked first, according to a rating by the Ministry of Ecology obtained by Ukrainska Pravda.
ArcelorMittal, a steel plant in the city of Kryvyi Rih in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, took second place.
Overall, Akhmetov’s plants — including the Kurakhivska, Burshtyn and Zaporizhzhya coal power plants, the major steelmaker Azovstal and the Pokrovske coal company — were responsible for 723,000 of the 1.92 million tons of hazardous emissions detected by the Ecology Ministry in the country last year.
Other top polluters included the state-owned energy company Centrenergo, and the Dnipro Metallurgical plant owned by the Industrial Union of Donbas corporation of Serhiy Taruta and Oleg Mkrtchan.
Pollution from plants belonging to Akhmetov’s company Metinvest has been a perennial problem in Mariupol, whose residents were exposed to 10 times more industrial pollution than the average Ukrainian in 2020.
In 2018, several thousand people from the city chanted the slogan “We want to breathe” at a protest against the company and its owner, Ukraine’s richest man.
Metinvest has been nicknamed “Smertinvest” (“Deathinvest”) by some Mariupol residents. As of 2018, the city’s air was 10 times more contaminated than the Ukrainian average, causing an alarmingly high rate of lung cancer deaths, among numerous other ailments.
Read also: Akhmetov’s Metinvest pays fine for polluting Mariupol
