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Canada’s Black Iron mining company has signed a preliminary agreement with an American institutional investor to raise US $100 million to create new iron ore production in Kryvyi Rih, Dnipropetrovsk region. Saying the planned investment “changes the rules of the game for Black Iron,” Black Iron CEO Matt Simpson said it would allow the company to start construction in the second half of the year.

Stalled in the planning stages for a decade, Black Iron gained a new life this year due to three factors: jumping iron prices, China’s drive to diversify raw material imports away from Australia, and the fact that Kryvyi Rih is President Zelenskiy’s home town. At current iron prices, the pay payback period of the US $452 million first phase project is estimated at 2.9 years. Raw material reserves are 411 million tons. The life of the project is 17 years.

Dragon Capital has won approval to buy Kyiv’s Unex Bank from Vadym Novynskyi, reports Ukraine’s Antimonopoly Committee. Neither Dragon nor Novynskyi’s Smart Holding confirmed a sale to Interfax-Ukraine. According to the National Bank of Ukraine, Unex Bank ranked 64th out 74 banks in Ukraine with assets of $28 million. Founded in 1993, the bank originally focused on large industrial corporations in central Ukraine. It now has 22 branches in nine regions.

AxDraft, a fast-growing Kyiv startup that automates the preparation of legal documents, has been acquired by Onit, a Houston-based legal technology company. Founded only three years ago, AxDraft has worked in Ukraine with Carlsberg, Dragon, DTEK, Glovo and OLX. In 2018, AxDraft participated in Y Combinator, the famous U.S. startup accelerator, then, in 2019, it raised $1.2 million from Silicon Valley venture capital investors. “This makes us the first Ukrainian legal technology startup to make a successful exit,” AxDraft founder

New Jersey’s Holtec International has completed the first $70 million stage of a 20-year, $1.3 billion project to build a nuclear spent fuel storage repository near Chornobyl. The site will take waste from three of Ukraine’s four nuclear power plants – Khmelnytskyi, Rivne, South Ukraine. Ukraine’s fourth plant, Zaporizhzhia, has its own onsite, US-designed storage facility. Ukraine’s new central repository, located three km west of the abandoned Chornobyl power station and 150 km north of Kyiv, is to start accepting

Stainless steel nuclear waste canisters, each weighing almost 200 tons, will arrive by rail at the repository site in Yaniv, Kyiv Oblast. Over the next six months, Ukrzaliznytsia crews are to reopen 43 km of track west to Vilkhova, Zhytomyr. This line was abandoned after the 1986 disaster. Energoatom, Ukraine’s state nuclear power operator, will run this line through the Exclusion Zone. After last year’s boom in Chornobyl tourism, Kyiv tour operators are interested in using the restored rail line.

Holtec will supply the first 94 containers — a $300 million contract. Simultaneously, Ukraine is to use Holtec technology to start making its own canisters, for domestic use and export. Yesterday, UNIAN reviewed the storage project in a 2,000-word analysis. Noting that Holtec is using the same dry storage equipment in Belgium, Sweden, the UK and the US, the news agency concludes that Ukraine’s repository “will be the most modern and safest nuclear fuel storage facility in its class.”

During this decade, Ukraine’s electricity production from nuclear will rise from 53% today, to 57% in 2030. At the same time, the electricity share from coal will drop almost in half, to 12%. These were the predictions made yesterday by Maksym Timchenko, CEO of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest privately owned energy company. Coal-fired power plants increasingly be used as standby sources of electricity, predicted Timchenko, whose company employs thousands of coal miners and operates most of Ukraine’s coal-fired power plants.

In a radical corporate turnaround, DTEK wants to be Ukraine’s leader in decarbonization, Timchenko said during his presentation of DTEK’s strategy to 2030. “We want to change, we want to move from a high-carbon business to a green, efficient one,” he said. “We declare DTEK’s carbon neutrality by 2040…Both the entire business structure and the investments that we will make in the coming years will allow us to fulfill this commitment.” By 2030, he promised, renewables will account of at

After investing about $1 billion in Ukraine wind and solar projects in the last three years, DTEK now redirects its renewables investments to the EU. “Today our investments in European countries are in a very active development phase,” Timchenko said. “In 2021, we will have the first pilot projects for the construction of wind and solar power generation in the European Union.” Behind the pause in Ukraine investments is the $1 billion overdue power bill that the state-controlled Guaranteed Buyer

Starting last Thursday, Wizz Air resumed flights from Kharkiv to all its German and Polish destinations. Ukrainian tourists are not allowed to travel to Poland and Germany. With the exception of Ukrainians with valid work permits who are allowed to fly. Wizz Air, the airline with the most destinations from Kharkiv, now flies to six EU cities, down from 10 last spring, before the coronavirus lockdown.

A 150 km ring road around Kyiv and a 1.7 km suspension bridge over the Dnipro at Kremenchuk are to stem from Cabinet of Ministers’ recent approval of an infrastructure agreement with China. “With this agreement, we open the door for Chinese loans to infrastructure,” Viktor Dovhan, international advisor to Infrastructure Vladyslav Krikliy wrote on his Facebook page. The Kyiv Bypass highway will be U-shaped, providing connections to all main highways, from the M-1 to Chernihiv in the north, to

Aiming to cut road deaths by 30% by 2024, the government has approved spending $85 million in 2021 on the first year of an international highway safety program. The money will be spent on 400 illuminated pedestrian crossings, 300 dampers to minimize head on collisions, Weight-in-Motion systems to detect overweight trucks, speed cameras in fixed positions and in police cars, and the construction of 20 roundabouts to replace dangerous intersections.

Ridership of the Kyiv Metro is down 40% yoy, to 250 million this year, Kyiv Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko told reporters yesterday. Referring to the 2-month lockdown last spring, he said: “For the first time in 60 years of the existence of the Kiev metro, it did not work.” By the end of this month, all 52 stations of the system are to have 4G mobile internet. By the end of next year, two new stations should open on the Green

The government last night appointed Yuriy Vitrenko, the former Naftogaz executive, as acting Energy Minister and First Deputy Minister of Energy. Vitrenko replaces Olha Buslavets, who ran the Energy Minister since April. A graduate of the INSEAD, the French business university, Vitrenko spearheaded a successful Stockholm arbitration case against Gazprom. Although Gazprom paid Naftogaz $2.9 billion, a contingency fee payout for Vitrenko’s team rankled some. Last week, when his candidacy came up for vote, he won only 82% of the

More litigation with Russia and more openness to Western investment may emerge under Vitrenko. Interspersed with stints at Naftogaz, Vitrenko worked for Pricewaterhouse Coopers in Kyiv, Merrill Lynch in London, and Amstar Europe, a private equity fund, affiliated with a Denver group. He is CEO of AYA Capital, a Kyiv-based investment company he founded a decade ago. At Naftogaz, he worked on several large Eurobond placements.

Yulia Kovaliv, a familiar face to foreign investors, resigned yesterday as deputy chief of staff to President Zelenskiy. Kovaliv also headed the Office of the National Investment Council, an organization that promoted dialogue between the government and CEOs of the leading foreign investors in Ukraine.

The government also appointed Vadym Melnyk as head of the State Fiscal Service. The previous fulltime head of the service, Serhiy Verlanov, was dismissed last April.

The Kyiv Economic Court accepted last week a lawsuit alleging that Roman Leshchenko, Ukraine’s newly appointed Agriculture Minister, embezzled $430,000 from a Ukrainian farming company owned by Kurt Jacob Groszhans, a North Dakota farmer. The lawsuit indicates more claims will be filed for misappropriated grain. Before Leshchenko’s Rada confirmation vote Thursday, he reportedly told questioners that he repaid all debts to the American investor. Groszhans is represented by US attorney Bate Toms.

While the US government labors to determine damage done by cyber infiltrators, Ukraine’s government faces almost daily hacker attacks on its government resources and is strengthening its cyber security, Ivan Bakanov, the SBU state security service, wrote Friday on Telegram. “The scale of the infiltration into government information resources is impressive – attacks occur almost daily,” he said. In 2019, a virus downloaded in a tax accounting program caused millions of dollars of damages to companies in Ukraine. Russia is