For more than two weeks now, a key battlefront in the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine has been the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol. This is one of the largest metalworks facilities in Europe, with four square miles of heavy industrial buildings, warehouses, furnaces, and underground tunnels, surrounded and crisscrossed by railroad tracks, running along the coastline of the Tahanrozka Gulf of the Black Sea. After weeks of intense shelling and fighting, almost all of the aboveground buildings are rubble or have been damaged by fire.
A sister facility, the Illich Integrated Iron and Steel Works, is similarly destroyed.
Meanwhile, in a sign that our government does not go back and check to see if we still need tariffs that are in place, the United States still has a 25 percent tariff on Ukrainian steel. Ending these tariffs is at the discretion of the president, but Biden hasn’t gotten around to it. (The Biden administration wants to send Ukraine $33 billion in military and humanitarian aid, but I guess the plan is to make the money back on steel tariffs.)
My first thought was that the continuing steel tariff was silly but irrelevant, because Ukraine wasn’t likely to be exporting much steel for the foreseeable future. But go figure, one of the country’s other large steel mills, ArcelorMittal Kryvyi Rih in central Ukraine, restarted one of its blast furnaces on April 9, and said it could restart a second furnace in May, if conditions allow.
So the Biden administration could make it easier for Ukraine to export steel to the U.S., but its just choosing not to do that.