A woman holds two artefacts from the closed manganese ore mine in Stepnohirsk, Zaporizhzhia Oblast. Stock photo: Dmytro Smolyenko via Getty Images
Russia begins developing largest manganese deposit in occupied part of Ukraine
Reale Engineering Invest, a Russian company, will develop the Velyko-Tokmak manganese deposit in the occupied part of Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia Oblast.
Ukrainska Pravda
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Reale Engineering Invest, a Russian company, will develop the Velyko-Tokmak manganese deposit in the occupied part of Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia Oblast.
Source: The Moscow Times, an independent Amsterdam-based news outlet, citing Kommersant, a Kremlin-aligned Russian newspaper
Details: Kommersant said the company obtained a licence for mineral extraction in February 2026 and began geological exploration in April.
It noted that 25.1% of the company is owned by RT-Business Development LLC, a firm affiliated with Rostec, a Russian state-run conglomerate central to the country's military-industrial complex.
The Velyko-Tokmak deposit ranks among the world's top five manganese deposits in terms of reserves, estimated at 1.7 billion tonnes.
It significantly exceeds Russia's largest deposits – the Usinskoye deposit in Kemerovo Oblast (127.7 million tonnes) and the Porozhinskoye deposit in Krasnoyarsk Krai (29.46 million tonnes).
Meanwhile, industrial manganese extraction in Russia is carried out at only one deposit in Bashkortostan.
More than 90% of this metal, used to improve the properties of steel, is imported by Russia.
Kommersant notes that construction of a mining and processing plant has already begun near the deposit, where around 3,000 people are expected to be employed.
Background: Egypt will no longer accept grain exported by Russia from the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine.
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