Acute shortage of workers at public utility companies in the occupied east

There is an acute shortage of ambulance drivers in the occupied part of the Luhansk region, Larysa Bondarenko, deputy director of the Luhansk Centre for Emergency and Disaster Medicine, said in an interview with the Lugansk Information Centre (LIC). LIC is the main “news agency” of the Luhansk “republic”.

“There are enough cars, but unfortunately, there is an acute staff shortage, especially among drivers,” she said. According to Bondarenko, the emergency medicine centre in Luhansk is approximately 49 per cent staffed with drivers.

In October, LIC reported that there was an even more acute shortage of public transport drivers in Luhansk.

“The shortage of drivers today is about 300 people. Currently, 130 are working on the routes. The staff requirement is 430 drivers,” Vladislav Nasonov, director of the municipal company Luhanskgortrans, told the agency.

Other public utility companies in the occupied parts of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions are also facing a critical staff shortage.

For example, on 27 November, the pro-Kremlin Telegram channel Donbass Decides published a message from a director of an “integrated customer service” in one of Donetsk’s districts, Olena Zhuravska, which stated that local utility providers offices were understaffed with welders and plumbers.

According to Zhuravska, the six utility provider offices in the district are only seven per cent staffed with welders and 12 per cent with plumbers.

Comments on social media show that some residents of Donetsk have to wait weeks for repair crews to arrive to fix water supply systems.

From comments on the Russian social media platform VK