"The sanctions have not been circumvented and ArcelorMittal is no longer sourcing raw materials from Russia," ArcelorMittal said after the publication of , whose Russian edition has been censored in Russia since the start of the war in Ukraine.
The media reported that the steel giant had resumed shipments to Russia a month after suspending them via its facilities in Kazakhstan.
ArcelorMittal, which is based in Luxembourg, has made a clear statement on the subject. "The international sanctions have not been circumvented. ArcelorMittal respects these sanctions and no products prohibited by international sanctions have been exported to Russia." Without going into details, the steel giant nevertheless specifies that it does have steel activities in Kazakhstan with nearly 35,000 employees.
Moreover, ArcelorMittal has confirmed that it no longer buys raw materials from Russia. Last March, a month after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Geert van Poelvoorde, CEO of ArcelorMittal Europe, had already assured the Belgian daily Le Soir that the company "no longer buys raw materials from Russia" and that it was "completely independent" in the supply of raw materials such as coal and iron ore.
20% of capacity in Ukraine
Before the war in Ukraine, ArcelorMittal had indicated that about one fifth of the coal used in its European plants came from Russia. In the European steel industry as a whole, half of the coal used was of Russian origin.
In Ukraine, ArcelorMittal has a single production site. Located in Kryvyï Rih near Dnipropetrovsk, the group employed about 26,000 people in the country. Following the invasion by Russian forces, ArcelorMittal shut down its site but continued to pay its workers' wages. A blast furnace at the plant has recently been started up and is running at 20% capacity to produce steel for the reconstruction of Ukraine. As far as staff is concerned, it is still difficult to know how many people are still employed due to the general mobilisation of the country's workforce to face the Russian forces. Without giving any figures, ArcelorMittal says that "unfortunately some of its employees died in combat".
This story was first published in French on . It has been translated and edited for Delano.