The largest Ukrainian steel producer lost half of its business during the war with Russia. Thus, you might think that Metinvest BV CEO Yuri Ryzhenkov's main fear right now is related to a new attack that will deal another devastating blow to the firm's survival. This is not true.
“Most worrying is the possibility of fatigue in the West if they get tired of supporting Ukraine and try to impose a solution by cutting off arms supplies,” Ryzhenkov said during an interview in London. Metinvest has steel mills in the UK, Italy, the US and Bulgaria, in addition to Ukraine.
Most Ukrainians agree. When asked whether the country should continue the war or negotiate a ceasefire to stop the shelling of their cities, 86% of respondents were in favor of continuing the fighting, according to a telephone poll conducted October 21-23 by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology. .
But worries are growing in Ukraine about the weakening of the West's resolve, because, despite Washington's public assurances of unwavering support for Berlin, there are also calls for speedy negotiations.
Last week, senior US military chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley said he sees a "window of opportunity" for peace talks, saying military victory is "out of reach" for either side. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan offered his services as an intermediary.
At a briefing on Tuesday, Western officials said despite Ukraine's repeated ability to surprise, they expect the war to continue through the winter with neither side able to win until 2023. weapons and ammunition will probably prove decisive.
In the case of Ukraine, they will have to come primarily from the US and Europe. Supreme Commander Valery Zaluzhny told Milli in a phone call on Monday that there could be no talks unless Russia withdraws from all Ukrainian territory, according to a post on the Ukrainian General Staff's Facebook page.
Earlier this year, Metinvest's production capacity was halved when the defenders of Mariupol made their last stand at the Azovstal plant. Its next-largest furnaces are half-operated in Zaporozhye, a city under heavy Russian rocket fire.
The company survives mainly due to its in-demand coal mining business. But for Metinvest — and Ukraine's economy as a whole — the problem with the negotiated ceasefire, Ryzhenkov said, is that without a full Russian withdrawal, it will be impossible to invest in Ukraine for the foreseeable future.
“We made such a mistake once before, in 2014,” Ryzhenkov said, again referring to the Minsk deals. The so-called line of contact created by these agreements between Ukraine and separatist-held territory began just 20 miles from Mariupol.
“We continued our investments in Mariupol, based on the fact that there will be a new border line,” Ryzhenkov said. Speaking to Bloomberg just weeks before the war, he was so confident that Russia would not invade that he said he was building a $1 billion rolling mill at Azovstal.
According to Ryzhenkov, investors will no longer risk repeating this mistake. This is especially true in the war-torn southeast, where many businessmen, including Metinvest's controlling shareholder Rinat Akhmetov, were closely linked to Ukraine's pro-Russian political parties until Putin annexed Crimea and ignited conflict in the Donbas in 2014.
“There can be no diplomatic solution, because a diplomatic solution means that the war is not over, just put on pause, which means you will never be able to invest,” says Ryzhenkov. "Ukraine has no other choice but to fight."
