SNIZHNE, Ukraine — Outside Vladimir Moroz’s snug little brick home, winter and hardship grip war-stricken eastern Ukraine. Money is scarce, the store shelves are bare and an icy wind whips over the snowy steppe.
Inside, a retired miner smiles broadly. He peels off his gloves and flexes his cold-stiffened hands over a stove and his prized, glowing, once-illicit source of warmth: backyard coal dug from dangerous, unregulated mines.
In a region plagued by upheaval and misfortune, coal miners who take pride in their grit and self-reliance have found at least one silver lining in changes sweeping over their land. The rebel government has decided to allow private mining, a long-stigmatized, legally proscribed but nevertheless widespread practice in Ukraine’s east.
“I have my own potatoes, my own carrots, my own cabbage and my own mine,” Mr. Moroz said, referring to the dank pit under a shed out back. “This is how we live.”
Deep in the backcountry of Donbass, as the rebellious region of eastern Ukraine is known, rich seams of coal undulate just under the hills. In places, kicking back the topsoil with a boot reveals glistening layers of coal, as mysterious and alluring to these miners as onyx.
Mr. Moroz struggles to recall when he was last paid a pension; maybe it was August. Relatives have fled, food is scarce and danger is never far away.
But coal, at least, is plentiful. So long as Ukraine’s legions of small-time miners pay taxes to the rebel government, the Donetsk People’s Republic, they are free to dig wherever and however they see fit.
Private mines popped up across Donbass as the Soviet era faded into the past, and now they are everywhere. Amid the oak groves and wild rose bushes carpeting the hills, every few hundred feet, the snowdrifts cave in on a homemade pit into the abyss: It is the heart of the once-illegal coal mining country.
“We are all miners,” Mr. Moroz said of the community’s response to the poverty of the post-Soviet period. “All we knew how to do was dig.”
Miners, of course, always knew that the coal seams did not end at the edge of the state-owned mines. But Soviet mines gave employees truckloads of thermal coal as a perquisite, so nobody bothered to dig in their yards.
In the late 1990s when this practice stopped, private mines, called kopenki, appeared like craters over the landscape, filling an economic niche and akin to illegal whiskey stills in the Appalachians. Everybody knew they existed, the local police took a cut and strangers were never allowed anywhere close. Now, in a populist move, the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic has lifted the prohibition.
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