As part of Rinat Akhmetov’s Steel Front military initiative, Metinvest is working on exporting bunkers for the border between Poland and Russia, the company’s Chief Operating Officer (COO) Alexander Mironenko said in an interview with Pryamyy TV channel.
“We are mainly working with our Western partners on shelters. This is very relevant right now: we are showing them our solutions for the construction of various structures. For example, a hospital that fully complies with NATO Role2 standards. It has been inspected by numerous delegations: military medics, engineers, and foreign specialists, and everyone agreed that the solutions are quite effective,” said Myronenko.
According to him, the company has presented its engineering solutions based on “hideouts” at many military-themed exhibitions and meetings, and they are very popular.
“We are currently working on entering the international market with these solutions, for example, for the construction of the border between Poland and Russia, using our experience and proposals for underground structures. The NATO army does not have such experience, so they are very interested in this. And we exchange information and experience with them,” said the COO.
He added that the shelters have undergone a major transformation. Initially, they were simply “barrels” buried in the ground. “Now we provide a full service — it is essentially an underground house with its own lighting, generator, stove, and all amenities: just plug the generator into the outlet, and the room is ready for use,” the COO clarified.
“The unique product we are proud of is, of course, the protective structures for the Patriot and SAMP/T air defense systems. And now we are developing protection for the Hawk air defense system control module, which operates in Ukraine. In my opinion, this is a unique experience, because we are talking about state-of-the-art technology designed to protect the sky from the enemy, but certain shortcomings have been revealed in real combat conditions. Together with the military, we corrected them – we made the control modules, radar installations, and other systems safer so that personnel could feel confident even in dangerous situations and conduct air defense of our cities and towns,” explained the top manager.
He added that the company plans to continue supporting the military in all areas, both through the purchase of equipment and through the provision of its own products.
“In production, we will focus on protecting equipment: we will improve existing solutions and develop new ones for different types of equipment. The second area is the development of ”shelters” and solutions based on them. An underground training center has already been built on the basis of such shelters, and we are now completing the construction of another large underground center for pilot training. This is a large niche in which we plan to continue working and developing,” Myronenko concluded.
