• L’Ukraine orientale vue du Svalbard…

    Ukrainians Find Jobs and a Slice of Russia in Arctic Norway - NYTimes.com
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/world/europe/ukrainians-find-jobs-and-a-slice-of-russia-in-arctic-norway.html

    “There is a long line of people who want to work here,” he said, waving a list of new recruits, all of them from Ukraine. “If they could find jobs at home and feed their families, do you think they would come to this place?”

    Of the 400 miners, technicians and support staff members now working for the Arctic Coal Trust on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, more than 300 come from Ukraine. Nearly all are from Donetsk and Luhansk, the eastern Ukrainian regions that have been convulsed in recent months by violent unrest.
    (…)
    The readiness of so many Ukrainians from the country’s Russian-speaking east to move to the Arctic, he said, is a clear sign that the root cause of Ukraine’s current troubles is economic misery, not meddling by the Kremlin or agitation by local hotheads with guns.
    (…)
    Mikhail Golovonov, a 33-year-old miner from Luhansk, said he was too young to remember much about the Soviet Union but regrets nonetheless that it fell apart and made him a citizen of Ukraine. He said he would prefer to be Russian.

    Life in the Arctic, he said, “is very boring and cold” but still more comfortable and secure than in Luhansk, where he had trouble finding a place to live because he did not earn enough to buy an apartment. He now lives with his wife and young son in subsidized company housing and saves nearly all his salary, as there is nothing much to buy. The only store is a company-run commissary stocked with canned food from Russia.
    (…)
    A capsule of Soviet life frozen in time, the Arctic Coal Trust has also preserved the ethnic hierarchies of the Soviet era. If most of the miners are Ukrainians, the management is top-heavy with Russians. Unskilled work like clearing snow and demolishing buildings is handled by laborers from Armenia and Tajikistan.
    (…)
    Though reluctant to give up its strategic foothold in the high Arctic, Moscow has been trying for years to cut the cost of running what has in effect become a state-funded work program for penniless Ukrainians. The loss-making Arctic Coal Trust has steadily reduced its operations since the end of the Soviet Union, when it employed more than 4,000 people, 10 times what it has now.

    Mais peut-être un grand avenir touristique…


    (dommage, pas de portfolio…)

    Under pressure to pay its own way and rely less on handouts from Moscow, the company is now pushing to develop Barentsburg as a tourist destination, a hard go as its main selling point, aside from a stunning setting on a mountain-fringed fjord, is its authentic Soviet griminess. It is also hard to get to. There are no roads connecting it to Spitsbergen’s only airport, which is reachable only by snowmobile or boat.

    Undeterred, the mining company has opened a souvenir shop and a luxury hotel to replace a rundown guesthouse. The four-story hotel had no paying guests on a recent day, only a few lodgers from the coal company.