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On a recent morning in eastern Ukraine, Karina Yatsina, a mine worker, was busy operating a conveyor belt in a dim, 1,200-foot-deep tunnel. Lights flickered at the end of the shaft, illuminating miners carving out the coal seams.
A year and a half ago, Ms. Yatsina, 21, was working as a nanny. Then friends told her that a mine in the eastern town of Pavlohrad was hiring women to replace men drafted into the military. The pay was good and the pension generous. It wasn’t long before Ms. Yatsina was walking through the mine’s maze of tunnels, a headlamp strapped to her red helmet.
“I would have never thought that I would be working in a mine,” Ms. Yatsina said, taking a short break in the sweltering heat of the tunnel. “I would have never imagined that.”
Ms. Yatsina is one of 130 women who have started working underground at the mine since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. They now operate conveyors that carry coal to the surface, work as safety inspectors or drive the trains that connect the different parts of the mine.
“Their help is enormous because many men went to fight and are no longer available,” said Serhiy Faraonov, the deputy head of the mine, which is run by DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company. Some 1,000 male workers at the mine have been drafted, he said, or about a fifth of the total work force. To help make up for the shortage, the mine has hired some 330 women.
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