A view of the Ulyanovskaya mine near Novokuznetsk, Kemerovo. Misha Japaridze / AP / Press Association Images. All rights reserved.The grey-and-black coalfields of Siberia’s Kuzbass are home to Russia’s export coal industry. Billions of tonnes of coal lie submerged in the ground here, and roughly 200m tonnes is dug out for transport and stockpile every year through open cast mining. This extraction business, subsidised partially by the Russian state, has significant impacts not only in terms of air and water pollution in the region, but on indigenous communities, who face being bought out or run off their land.
Some 4,000 miles away, the UK may be decreasing coal imports, but we still get 43% of our thermal coal imports every year from the Kuzbass. As the government considers phasing out coal power completely, a new report “Ditch Coal” by the Coal Action Network highlights the environmental and political effects of this dependency, whether in the UK or Russia.
This month, the Coal Action Network starts its tour of the UK. We sat down with one of the people involved — Vladimir Slivyak, co-chair of Russian environmental group Ecodefence — to talk about environmental activism and the coal industry in Russia.
