Russians are going to dig for gold in the occupied part of the Luhansk region

The occupation administration of the Luhansk region wants to give a gold and silver deposit in the Antratsyt district to an investor, “deputy head of government” of the Luhansk “republic” Pavel Kovaliov said in a commentary to the local propaganda outlet LIC, Realna Gazeta reported.

An investor is going to be selected at an auction. The investor is expected to explore and mine gold and silver ore at the Bobrykivske deposit, located near the town of Antratsyt.

Kovaliov said that “more than a hundred years ago, perhaps, there were the first references to gold ore” in the area. According to him, boreholes have also shown the presence of gold in the Antratsyt district. “The estimated reserves are 1,663 kg of gold and 10 tonnes of silver,” Kovaliov added.

The Bobrykivske gold field was discovered by Soviet geologists who were tasked with mapping all the mineral resources of the Soviet Union. This field was labelled as “probable reserves”. The Soviet geologists estimated the Bobrykivske deposit at 2.3-3 million ounces of gold and 16 million ounces of silver. At cost, mining was deemed economically unfeasible.

During Ukraine’s independence, the state programme Gold of Ukraine tried to mine gold near Antratsyt. The development was handed over to a private company, Donetsk Kryazh, which had to decide how to extract the minerals. In about four years, they mined 10,000 tonnes of ore, which yielded 40 kg of raw gold. Further purification was expensive, and little pure product was obtained.

Australian investors, who partially bought Donetsk Kriazh, also failed to develop the “bonanza”. They claimed that the gold content in the ore ranged from 1 g/tonne to 16 g/tonne. It was necessary to attract investors to build a concentrator. However, no one was interested in the idea.

After 2014, the then-head of the Luhansk “republic” Igor Plotnitsky started to talk about the “Luhansk Eldorado”. However, no one initiated mining gold back then.