The Roshen factory, owned by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, has operated in the Russian city of Lipetsk for 13 years. It was one of the largest manufacturers in city and produced Roshen products to be sold not only in Russia, but abroad as well.

In the Spring of 2017, the Russian Investigative Committee seized the factory’s accounts as part of a fraud case. Therefore, the factory has now ceased operation.

In the summer of that same year, the factory suspended operation. Close to 700 workers were made redundant, leaving just a few dozen employees to maintain the equipment. Hromadske visited Lipetsk to find out what life is like in the now defunct factory.

Roshen had two sites in Lipetsk: one in the city center, and another in the village of Sentsovo, 20 kilometers outside the city. There were plans for another site in the village of Kosirevo, not far from Lipetsk, but construction stopped in 2015, the year it was meant to start working.

There are only a few dozen people left at the factory – the security guards and the technical staff, who look after the equipment. As soon as the factory resumes operation, it will need to be set up quickly and start functioning. No one here as any doubt that this will happen.

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At Roshen’s administration building in the Lipetsk city center, we meet Yuriy, the head security guard. He is almost 60 years old and has worked at the factory since it first opened. His colleagues treat him with respect, calling him by his name and patronymic – Yuriy Oleksandrovych. On his desk in his office, he has Roshen business cards. He does not offer us any candies, he says they ran out a long time. He adds that it’s a shame because before, they would have always offered visiting journalist something sweet to eat with their tea.

Photo credit: Oleksandr Popenko/HROMADSKE

Ukrainian journalists have visited Lipetsk a few times, even since the 2014 and outbreak of the war in eastern Ukraine between Ukraine and Russia-backed militants. On becoming president, Poroshenko promised to sell his business but went back on his word. The business, which has operated successfully in Russia, has been criticized in particular. This is when the factory started to attract interest. Before 2014, local journalists would come to the factory to report on “little Europe in the center of Lipetsk.” Yuriy highlights the fact that nothing like Roshen has ever existed in Russia.

“Of course, I can’t speak for everyone, but, in terms of confectionary. So, there was nothing like this anywhere. There has never been anything like this anywhere on this level, something really European, on this scale.”

Photo credit: Oleksandr Popenko/HROMADSKE

The workshop in the city center is the smallest. Here they made caramel candies and waffle cakes, mainly by order. Yuriy takes us on a tour of the snow-covered premises. He sighs: even in the most extreme winter weather, this site was always cleaned.

He shows us a few cars near the fence: “That’s all that’s left. There used to be so many cars here...You couldn’t even count them.”

“Little Europe”

We drive to the village of Sentsovo, where the main factory’s main site is located, in the Lipetsk region. Vladislav, the head of the technical service (or, to put it simply, the head electrician), drives us there in his own car.

Hanging under rear view mirror there is a St. George’s ribbon. Vladislav is Ukrainian, from Slovyansk in the Donetsk region. He moved to Lipetsk, in the early 2000s. He says that there wasn’t any work in Ukraine and they offered him a good position in Lipetsk.

Photo credit: Oleksandr Popenko/HROMADSKE

“My father said: Lipetsk is alright, a nice city, just go,” he smiles, remembering when he first moved to Russia. It did not take long for Vladislav to make his mind up about Lipetsk. He settled there, married a local girl and received Russian citizenship.

Photo credit: Oleksandr Popenko/HROMADSKE

Yuriy tells us about the city as we drive. He points out the polytechnic institute and the Novolipetsk Steel (NLMK) plant, which is the city’s main industry. And that concludes the guided tour around Lipetsk.

The roads in Lipetsk are in disrepair, the edges are covered in a red-colored dirt – the result of emissions and reagents, which is spread over the ice. It’s an ordinary industrial city, apart from in the factories, where there is no money to be earnt. Roshen was a unique goldmine for the people of Lipetsk. The wages were always higher there than other places in the city.

We come across three dogs at the entrance to the factory site in Sentsovo. They don’t bark at anyone, but whimper and fawn instead. The security guards feed them as almost no one else passes through when the factory is closed. The guards say that they haven’t even had any vandals on the premises: “People know that they will come back and work here, why would they want to ruin anything?”

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It’s very cold inside the workshop, even colder than outside. They have not had any central heating for a long time and there is only lighting in some places. The factory equipment has been wrapped up in protective covering and looks lost in the middle of the huge factory floor. Vladislav shows us the empty stands. The workers even took home the candies that were displayed there as examples of correct and defective packaging. A sweet smell still lingers in the air and the floor is sticky with puddles of caramel.

Photo credit: Oleksandr Popenko/HROMADSKE

“Damp. There’s sugar on the equipment, it sticks to everything,” Vladislav explains, “That’s why we get this ‘ice rink.’”

Vladislav has worked at the factory since 2010. He says that from day one he liked the good German equipment, the good working conditions. He affectionately runs his fingers over his company boiler suit, which the factory gave him. He emphasizes the fact the factory fed them tasty food for free, and it was the first place he had ever seen motion-sensor toilets. He adds that the factory even paid for the uniforms to be washed. It’s unlikely that these working conditions can be found anywhere else in Lipetsk.

Victims of circumstances

When Petro Poroshenko became president in 2014, there was almost no reaction to the news at the factory. Although, Yuriy says there were cases of drivers being picked up and beaten for working at a “fascist factory.” But this only happened rarely. The factory was mostly known for its good wages and working conditions, everything else did not matter.

“Well, they said that factory could close,” Vladislav tells us, “But we hoped that everything would be alright, that we would work as we have always worked, that it would just remain a business relationship. The president is the president, business is business.”

Photo credit: Oleksandr Popenko/HROMADSKE

But that wasn’t the case. The factory started to experience problems as early as 2015. In April, the Russian Investigative Committee carried out searches on account of “tax fraud,” which included “theft of monetary funds to the sum of 180 million rubles via illegal reimbursement from the Russian Federation.” The Ukrainian department referred to these actions as “unlawful.”

Therefore, the Investigative Committee have seized the property accounts several times and Roshen has challenged this at court. In January 2017, Roshen announced it was closing the factory. The preparations to shut down the factory were planned for April 2017, and then production stopped. They started to cut jobs in the summer of the same year. Yuriy says that all the workers were compensated in full and no one complained. This is why he is certain that the former workers will return when factory opens again.

Photo credit: Oleksandr Popenko/HROMADSKE

“As soon as the rumors that we’ve started working again crop up, people ring me: ‘Is it true? When can we come back?’” Yuriy says, “That’s why I am sure that, when everything starts up again, almost everyone will come back to work. Although, a lot of people have settled down already. Especially the management. We had a lot of young specialists here, they all went to other confectionary factories, to bakeries. But I am certain that they will come back. After all, there is nowhere else like this.”

Belief in the future

The third Roshen site in Lipetsk was never completed. The new workshop was supposed to manufacture products for export and on a scale that would surpass any Roshen factory in Ukraine. However, they decided to stop the building work in 2015. The construction started to gradually collapse, but they try to maintain everything the way it was here. And the security is the same here as everywhere else.

— What do you think about Petro Poroshenko?

Vladislav pauses for thought.

— What do I think of him… As a businessman, who has built this enterprise and supported it to an adequate level, he’s good. But as a president – I don’t know. I don’t even understand my own country, let alone someone else’s.

Photo credit: Oleksandr Popenko/HROMADSKE

Unlike the other 700 workers, Vladislav considers himself lucky. He has kept both his job and his salary. Although, of course, work is not the same as it was before, there is less creativity, he explains. He says that he is certain he will not leave. He is positive that the factory will open again, he just does not know when.

“Everything will work out all at once,” he says optimistically, “Maybe something will change for us in this country, as you say, for the better. Maybe not straight away, not in the first 5 years, maybe not even in 10. I’ve already started to think that far ahead in the future.”

/By Yuliana Skibitska and Oleksandr Popenko

/Translated by Sofia Fedeczko