I had visited Kryvyi Rih several times in 2006, when I spent two months as an election observer in Dnipropetrovsk (renamed Dnipro in 2016), the capital of the region to which Kryvyi Rih belongs. I found it an unprepossessing place, although I never really took the opportunity to get to know it. What struck me most was how spread out it was, with great distances from one part of town to another, and wide spaces in between. I hardly had any sense of a city centre. Most striking and most memorable was a row of four huge cooling towers at the giant Kryvorizhstal steelworks, as one drove down a road towards the industrial heart of the city. It was an impressive sight, which more than anything represented what Kryvyi Rih was, a town founded on the mining of iron ore and the production of steel. For me that cold winter, Kryvyi Rih was a place we visited quickly, had our meetings with local officials, grabbed a quick lunch, and then headed back to Dnipro. Even when I spent a couple of nights there, I never took the chance to get to know the city.
Revisiting 18 years later, in the summer of 2024, did not greatly alter my earlier impressions. Two of the cooling towers that so impressed me before had gone. Kryvyi Rih does have a city centre, around the city council building and a large, well-kept city park. But the city does not seem to have been built with humans in mind. Spread out over a wide area, with large empty spaces in between districts, with its huge industrial zones it was built for steelmaking, with minimal consideration for the thousands of workers who troop in and out of the vast industrial plants each day. It is a typical Soviet city, whose success was measured in the quantities of pig iron and steel produced, not in the good life that it provided for its inhabitants. Kryvyi Rih is not a city for walking. The distances are too great, and it lacks the pleasant café and restaurant-lined streets that make many other Ukrainian city centres such delightful places.
For those interested in industrial landscapes, Kryvyi Rih is, however, a bit of a gem. I was particularly struck by the contrast between natural beauty and brutal industrialism. The scenes across placid lakes, with men fishing, children feeding the ducks, and youngsters bathing, and across the water, the steel plant belching out red smoke from its chimneys and cooling towers, flames shooting into the air. It seemed like a vision of heaven and hell all in one vista.
I visited the Kryvorizhstal steelworks, and had a guided tour of the company museum. In 2005, the steelworks was bought by Indian-owned Mittal Steel, which became ArcelorMittal the following year, when Mittal took over its international rival, Arcelor. The privatisation had been the subject of considerable controversy, with political overtones. The steelworks had initially been sold to a Ukrainian consortium in 2004 that included Viktor Pinchuk, the son-in-law of the country’s former president, Leonid Kuchma, as well as Rinat Akhmetov, reputedly Ukraine’s richest oligarch. The sale price was generally seen as far too low. To many this seemed like an egregious example of the kind of cronyism that had enriched a new class of well-connected business oligarchs after the demise of the Soviet Union. Following the 2004 Orange revolution, the new prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, invalidated the privatisation, and the company was re-sold to Mittal for six-times the original sale price. However, this reversal did not turn into a more general attack on the privileges and ill-gotten gains of Ukraine’s oligarchs, and in hindsight looked more like an act of revenge by Tymoshenko against the beneficiaries of the Kuchma regime.
The Kryvorizhstal steelworks
The story of the Kryvorizhstal steelworks told at the museum is largely the story of Kryvyi Rih itself. The city name, which means “crooked horn”, predates the foundation of the city, when it referred to the general area, a part of the Cossack Zaporizhzhia Sich. The growth of the town as a centre for the iron and steel industry began in the late 19th century, and took off during the Soviet period, as part of Stalin’s brutal, breakneck industrialisation.
I struggled to follow my guide’s explanations. Despite telling him that my Ukrainian language was very poor, and that I understood Russian much better, he gave the whole tour in Ukrainian. Perhaps because Ukrainians can invariably understand both languages, and routinely hold conversations in which one person speaks Ukrainian and the other Russian, he did not appreciate that, for many foreigners, being able to speak one did not necessarily mean being able to understand the other. That there has been a widespread move away from speaking Russian and towards Ukrainian since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 is unsurprising and understandable. Kryvyi Rih, like other cities in eastern and southern Ukraine, had been predominantly Russian-speaking. Quite possibly my guide still spoke Russian with his family and friends. It is notable, for example, that frequently waiters, waitresses and shop assistants speak Ukrainian with customers, as required by law, but converse among themselves in Russian. No doubt Russian will continue to be widely spoken for some time to come. But a generational shift is taking place. The days when Russian-speaking foreigners could expect to get by in Ukraine with Russian are almost certainly numbered.
My guide presented a positive story of the steelworks and of the town. ArcelorMittal had invested considerable sums in the plant, and its future, he said, was bright. He proudly pointed to photographs of famous buildings and edifices built with Kryvorizhstal steel. These included the ArcelorMittal Orbit tower, built in east London for the 2012 Olympics, and largely financed by Lakshmi Mittal, the company’s chairman, as well as the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai.
He did not mention the major industrial unrest at the plant in 2017 and 2018 over low wages and lack of investment in safety. In 2018, a roof collapse had killed a young worker at the plant. He also denied there had been any tension in 2014 between pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian activists, when violent confrontations broke out in several towns across the east and south of the country, including Kryvyi Rih. As in most of eastern Ukraine, the Euromaidan revolution and the overthrow of President Yanukovych had aroused widespread antagonism in Kryvyi Rih. In April that year, a pro-Russian plan to hold protests and seize the city administration building was forestalled by a mass pro-Ukrainian counter-rally.
"Together to Victory!" Kryvyi Rih
Russia’s aggression was the last straw for most Ukrainians who had previously looked positively upon Russia and hoped for continued close ties. A striking example of this shift concerned one of Kryvyi Rih’s most prominent politicians, Oleksandr Vilkul. One of Yanukovych’s key lieutenants, Vilkul had served as governor of Dnipropetrovsk region and as a vice-prime minister under the disgraced president. Following Yanukovych’s ouster, he continued his political activity with the Opposition Bloc party, a successor to Yanukovych’s pro-Russian Party of Regions. Yet following Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Vilkul emerged as a staunch defender of Ukraine’s sovereignty. Three days after the invasion, he was appointed as head of the military administration of Kryvyi Rih. A few weeks later, Oleg Tsaryov, a Ukrainian politician who had taken the separatist side in 2014, addressing Vilkul as his “fellow party member”, called on him to surrender the city to the Russians, asserting that Vilkul had always been pro-Russian. Vilkul responded with a Facebook post telling Tsaryov “Fuck you, traitor, along with your masters.”
In the first month of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Kryvyi Rih was threatened by Russian forces pushing northwards from Kherson. An attempt to land paratroopers to secure the city’s airport was foiled, and columns of Russian vehicles were repulsed. Metinvest, one of Akhmetov’s companies, shut its open-cast iron ore mine and used its huge vehicles to block key roads. As in many places, such improvised defences, involving local companies and ordinary citizens, made an important contribution to the defence of the country during those fraught early weeks. As many other Ukrainian cities, Kryvyi Rih has repeatedly been struck by Russian missiles, damaging vital infrastructure and residential buildings. After a strike against a reservoir in September 2022, President Zelensky, a native of Kryvyi Rih, accused Russia of attempting to flood the city.
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