Shells leave Ukraine's coal miners digging for survival
They spend much of their day clearing their gardens of shrapnel, digging up potatoes or chopping wood to prepare for the fast-approaching winter.
The coal miners of the village of Vilkhivka in eastern Ukraine haven't been working for months, forced to down tools by the shells they say are still falling almost every day.
"As miners, we used to get coal for the stove," says Pavel Krivonosov, 64, who despite his age still used to work at the nearby state-owned Zhdanivka mine.
"Now the mine is shut, so we'll have nothing for the winter. And without electricity..." he trails off. "It can get down to minus 30, with the wind it's even worse."
He surveys the last crop of tomatoes, grapes and red peppers in his large vegetable garden, collecting mortar shrapnel and other fragments from various munitions into a grey metal bucket.
Vilkhivka, which lies about 50 kilometres (30 miles) from the main rebel stronghold of Donetsk, has been caught in the firing line as Ukrainian forces shell the pro-Russian separatists dug in nearby.
The village has been without water and electricity for more than a month. Half of its 600 inhabitants, those who could afford to, have left. Those remaining are miners without jobs, without money.
"We haven't had any wages or anything for three months," chimes in Krivonosov's neighbour Oleksandr Gabrichuk, 40, his brow glistening with dirt-brown sweat. "The pumps have been shut down, the mine is flooded. It'll take a year to get it started again," he says. "We're surviving on what we can get from the garden, that's all."
The fighting that has raged across eastern Ukraine since April has killed nearly 2,900 people and sent at least 600,000 fleeing devastated towns and cities.
Many of the once-powerful steelworks, coal mines and factories that form the backbone of Ukraine's heavy industry have ground to a halt and the country is now relying on a massive international aid package to stay afloat.
The IMF approved a $17 billion line of credit in April as part of a global $27 billion rescue but has warned even that might not be enough to shore up its finances.
Government figures show that national coal production -- which is concentrated in the eastern rustbelt known as Donbass -- plunged by half from January to August.
In May, the cabinet ordered the sale of dozens of state-owned coal mines, most of them loss-making ventures that benefited from government subsidies to keep running.
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