Metinvest working on exporting bunker shelters, including for Poland-Russia border — COO
Metinvest, within the framework of Rinat Akhmetov's military initiative Steel Front, is working on exporting bunker shelters for fortifying the border between Poland and Russia, company's Chief Operating Officer Oleksandr Myronenko said in an interview with Pryamyi TV channel.
"With our Western partners, we mainly work on shelters. This is very relevant now: we show them our solutions for building various structures. For example, a hospital that fully meets NATO Role2 standards. It has been inspected by numerous delegations: military medics, engineers and foreign specialists — and all recognized that the solutions are quite effective," Myronenko said.
According to him, at many exhibitions and meetings on military topics, the company presented its engineering solutions based on "shelters," and they are very popular.
"Now we are working on entering the international market with these solutions, for example, for fortifying the border between Poland and Russia, using our experience and proposals for underground structures. NATO armies don't have such experience, so they treat this with great interest. And we exchange information and experience with them," the COO stated.
He added that the shelters have undergone a major transformation. Initially it was just a "barrel" buried in the ground. "Now we provide full service — it's actually an underground house with its own lighting, generator, stove and all amenities: just connect the generator to an outlet — and the room is ready for use," the COO specified.
"A unique product that we are proud of is, of course, protective structures for Patriot and SAMP/T air defense systems. And now we are developing protection for the control module of the Hawk air defense system — an air defense system operating in Ukraine. In my opinion, this is a unique experience, because we're talking about state-of-the-art equipment designed to protect the sky from the enemy, but certain shortcomings were revealed in real combat conditions. Together with the military, we corrected them — made 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," the top manager explained.
He added that the company plans to continue supporting the military in all directions — both through equipment procurement and through assistance with its own products.
"In production, we will focus on equipment protection: we will improve existing solutions and develop new ones for different types of equipment. The second direction 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 construction of another one — a large underground center for pilot training. This is a large niche in which we plan to continue working and developing," Myronenko concluded.
