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Russia Begins Mining One of the World’s Biggest Manganese Sites in Occupied Zaporizhzhia Region
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A Russian company named Reale Engineering Invest has started work to develop the Bolshoy Tokmak manganese deposit located in the temporarily occupied part of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region.
The firm received a mining license in February 2026 and began geological exploration in April. Official records show that a branch of the Russian state corporation Rostec owns a 25.1% stake in the company, according to The Moscow Times on April 17.
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The Bolshoy Tokmak site is among the top five largest manganese deposits in the world. It holds reserves of 1.7 billion tons. This is much larger than the biggest deposits inside Russia, such as the Usinskoye site in the Kemerovo region or the Porozhinskoye site in the Krasnoyarsk region.
Currently, Russia only conducts industrial manganese mining at one site in Bashkiria. The country imports more than 90% of this metal from abroad to improve the quality of its steel.
Experts from a Russian state planning institute stated that the Bolshoy Tokmak deposit could produce up to 1.7 million tons of manganese every year.
This amount exceeds Russia’s annual need of 1.3 million tons. Construction has started on a processing plant near the site that is expected to employ 3,000 people.
The manganese content in the ore is “very high” at over 25% and that the reserves could last for 100 years. This source noted that the project will require cleaning and draining old mines, which could bring the total investment to 100 billion rubles. Because Rostec is involved, the project might receive cheaper financing.
However, some analysts point out that the future of the project is not certain. Challenges include a crisis in the global and Russian metal markets.
The head of the occupation administration in the Zaporizhzhia region, Yevgeny Balitsky, previously discussed these mining plans. He said that ferromanganese is necessary for Rostec because the company currently has to buy it from South Africa, Brazil, and Gabon.
Ukraine ranked among the world’s top ten countries in explored titanium ore reserves, contributing over 7% of global production. There were 28 known titanium deposits and more than 30 mineral occurrences at various exploration stages.
The primary titanium-bearing mineral was ilmenite, which was often found alongside zirconium deposits. At that time, only placer deposits—representing about 10% of explored reserves—were being mined, while the rest remained in primary deposits.
Titanium and its alloys were widely used in aerospace, rocket technology, shipbuilding, and medicine.
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