Ukraine wants to provide residents with free firewood and potbelly stoves

MOSCOW, 8 Oct — PRIME. The Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine approved a program for the purchase of firewood and mobile metal stoves, called “bourgeois stoves”, for the front-line regions, for which 563 million hryvnias ($15.2 million) are provided, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said on Saturday.

“563 million hryvnias ($15.2 million) the government allocates to 8 regions for the purchase of firewood and its free distribution to the population in the front-line territories. We also approve the procedure for distributing and delivering this firewood to people. In addition, Ukrzaliznytsia (Ukrainian Railways) – ed.), on behalf of the government, will produce 6,000 mobile metal stoves (bourgeois stoves) and additionally prepare 6,000 cubic meters of firewood for the Kherson region,” Shmygal said in his Telegram channel.

According to him, we are talking about communities in the Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Chernihiv, Kharkiv, Sumy, Kherson, Mykolaiv and Zaporozhye regions, since these regions are at risk of repeated damage to infrastructure due to hostilities. He noted that the measures taken are necessary if “communal services do not have time to restore the heating infrastructure.”

Earlier, the mayor of Lviv, Andriy Sadovoy, recorded a video message to the residents of the city, in which he urged them to prepare in advance for abnormal situations during the heating season and advised them to stock up on firewood. He assured that the city authorities are buying large quantities of potbelly stoves as “the only thing that can remain if the other does not work.”

Earlier, the head of the board of NJSC Naftogaz of Ukraine, Yuriy Vitrenko, said that already in the next heating season it is planned to completely abandon gas for central heating and switch to heating with biomass and garbage.