This is the only mine in Ukraine that produced coking coal, which is needed in the steel industry. “They have all stopped working now. There is no production there, they are only working on the surface,” Reuters sources say, noting that evacuation is already underway. Earlier, the president of Ukrmetallurgprom said that together with Pokrovsk, Ukraine will lose half of its steel production due to a coal shortage.
If they don’t force people to evacuate then a lot of the time those people choose to stay and go over to the Russians, and the Kiev regime is desperate for manpower (of any kind, not just for soldiers but labor forces too).
And when they can’t force the people to evacuate they just kill them. There are videos online of Ukrainian soldiers shooting Ukrainian civilians (who they know are civilians) who are fleeing and trying to go over to the Russians.
Meanwhile the Russians keep constantly finding shot civilians in homes and basements of liberated cities that the Ukrainian soldiers decided to kill before retreating for the “crime” of waiting for the Russians.
It’s very much a “if i can’t have you, no one can” mentality, though that’s not the only reason they do this. Because when you see and hear how the Kiev regime’s soldiers - at least the professional ones (who are basically all either Nazis or western mercs at this point) not the ones forcefully mobilized against their will - speak about the people in eastern Ukraine it becomes immediately clear that they are really afraid of their own civilians. A lot of the people there are Russian sympathizers who they think will give out their positions to the Russians.
So yeah, forced evacuation makes a lot of sense.