Monopoly fixed-phone operator Ukrtelecom has switched off part of its network in Donetsk Oblast after Russian-backed forces seized control of the company’s Donetsk office, the company said on March 1.
The operator, owned by Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, said it had cut the area off from the national network because it had lost centralized control over the occupied Ukrainian territories in Donetsk Oblast.
Internet and telephone services for almost 200,000 people were shut off.
“Staffers arrived at work to find people in masks and uniforms there,” Ukrtelecom spokesperson Mikhail Shuranov told the Kyiv Post. “The (masked people) asked to see (the staffers’) documents, started questioning them, and then forced them to leave the premises.”
Ukrtelecom’s Donetsk office, which has around 900 employees, continued working even after the Russian-backed forces occupation of these territories, because “we had no other orders from the (regulator), the Ukrainian State Centre of Radio Frequencies (UCRF),” Shuranov said.
“We asked and got no answer.”
The UCRF oversees Ukrtelecom because it’s a monopoly in Ukraine.
Russian-backed forces in control of parts of Donetsk Oblast announced that from midnight March 1 they would “nationalize” Ukrainian enterprises located on the territories they control.
This decision was taken in response to a blockade of railway lines linking the occupied and government-controlled parts of Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts by Ukrainian activists.
The blockade of the occupied parts of the Donbas started in late January. The activists, who include veterans of the military operation in the Donbas, demand that the government halt all trade with the occupied areas.
