Ukraine's Biggest Steelmaker Says Its Industry Is Close to Collapse

Ukraine's largest steel producer is warning that an industry which once anchored the country's export economy is being ground down by a war that will not let up and a trading partner that has stopped making room for it. Yuriy Ryzhenkov, chief executive of Metinvest, says the twin pressures of intensifying Russian bombing and a sharply reduced European Union tariff quota have pushed Ukrainian steelmaking to a point where collapse is no longer a remote possibility.

A workforce still fighting the war it is trying to survive

Metinvest employs about 33,700 people, and more than 8,000 of them are currently serving in Ukraine's armed forces, fighting the same Russian advance that keeps striking the company's own plants and shipping routes. Ryzhenkov has described the blockade of Ukraine's seaports as more severe now than it was at the start of the full scale invasion in 2022, a claim that underscores how much harder it has become simply to move steel out of the country, let alone make it.

The numbers tell the story on their own

Ukrainian steel output has fallen from 21 million metric tons in 2021 to 7.4 million in 2025, a collapse of nearly two thirds in four years. The export value of that production has dropped even further, from 22 billion dollars to about 6 billion. Tax revenue generated by the sector has fallen from 3.5 billion dollars to roughly 870 million, a decline that strips not just companies but the Ukrainian state itself of resources at the worst possible moment.

Rebuilding under fire

One of the deadliest recent strikes on the company killed 14 people, the worst single loss of life Metinvest has suffered since 2023, and Ryzhenkov has made clear that repairing damaged facilities under those conditions is nothing like a normal industrial rebuild. In wartime, he has said, a company cannot afford to restore a plant to its original state, because the next strike may simply undo the work again. Instead, repairs have to be judged against the odds that the same site gets hit a second time.

Europe closes a door just as the war intensifies

The military pressure would be hard enough to absorb on its own. What has made the situation more dire, in Ryzhenkov's telling, is a decision taken far from the front line. In July 2026 the European Union cut its tariff quota for Ukrainian steel by 60 percent, trimming the volume Ukraine can ship into the bloc tariff free by about 1.3 million metric tons a year. The EU has for years been the natural market for Ukrainian steel, geographically close and historically open to it, and the sudden narrowing of that channel has removed much of the outlet Ukrainian producers were counting on to offset the losses caused by the war itself.

Ryzhenkov argues the EU's tariff policy was written as if Ukraine were a normal trading partner, without accounting for the fact that its mills are operating inside an active war zone.

That mismatch, he argues, is what turns a difficult situation into an existential one. A country fighting to keep its factories standing needs its main export market to make allowances for wartime reality, not tighten the rules at the same moment the bombing intensifies.

A warning, not yet a verdict

Ryzhenkov has been careful to frame the outcome as avoidable rather than certain, saying that if nothing changes, the collapse of the industry is close to inevitable. The phrasing leaves room for intervention, whether through a changed EU trade posture, further Western support for rebuilding damaged capacity, or some combination of the two. But it also makes clear that the current trajectory, if left alone, does not bend back upward on its own. For an industry that once generated 22 billion dollars a year for a country now fighting for its survival, the next decisions made in Brussels and on the battlefield may determine whether Ukrainian steel has a future at all.