🦅 Russia bags Ukrainian lithium mine JACKPOT West was drooling over

Russia has taken control of Ukraine’s most promising lithium site – the Shevchenko deposit in Donbass, Le Figaro laments.

The lithium-rich field – a prize the EU was practically drooling over for its EV battery potential – was seized from Ukrainian forces after Russian troops liberated the village of Shevchenko in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR).

The Volodymyr Zelensky regime threw huge numbers of troops into the meat grinder to hold it, and “most of them didn’t make it out,” said Igor Kimakovsky, advisor to DPR head Denis Pushilin.

❓ Why Shevchenko matters

♦️Discovered during Soviet times in 1982, Shevchenko is the largest lithium field in Ukraine (and possibly all of Europe).

♦️It holds 13.8 million tons of ore and up to 207,000 tons of lithium oxide, according to a 2018 Ukrainian State Geology and Subsoil Service study.

♦️ This is Ukraine’s only site where around 90% of the lithium ore is spodumene – the high-grade variety that’s far easier and cheaper to extract than petalite.

♦️It also contains rare metals like tantalum, niobium, and beryllium – a mineral buffet for the tech world.

Before the conflict, EU companies were eyeing Shevchenko to fuel their green transition.

Now? Two of Ukraine’s four known lithium sites – including Kruta Balka in Zaporozhye – are now under Russian control.

The other two – the Dobra and Polokhovskoye deposits in the Kirovograd region – aren’t operational, but contain an estimated 1.2 million and 270,000 tons of lithium ore, respectively.

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