Russia just wiped out Ukraine's entire steel industry for the first time in a century

Russia's missile campaign just did something no war, revolution or economic crisis pulled off in a hundred years.

It stopped Ukraine making steel. All of it.

Three plants made up about 90% of Ukraine's steel output. Zaporozhstal. Kamet Steel. ArcelorMittal Krivoy Rih.

All three are now shut down.

Oleksandr Vodoviz runs the chief executive's office at Metinvest, the company that owns Zaporozhstal and Kamet Steel. He told the Financial Times, nine days ago, that Ukraine quote "doesn't have a steel industry any more".

So how did we get here?

It happened in stages. Zaporozhstal went dark after a Russian ballistic missile strike overnight into 11 August. That's about seven weeks ago.

Kamet Steel stopped after a strike overnight into 5 September.

And ArcelorMittal Krivoy Rih got hit four times in five weeks. The last one was 21 September. The company says the damage means it can't safely restart right now.

And here's the part that stands out.

Vodoviz says the strikes were precise. He said quote "they knew everything about the plant, they knew exactly where to hit".

Metinvest actually tried to restart one furnace at Zaporozhstal. It ran for ten hours. Then a second strike hit the plant again.

A week ago, at a Forbes Ukraine economic forum, Vodoviz gave the full damage count. Five furnaces destroyed across Metinvest's plants. Two more gone at ArcelorMittal Krivoy Rih.

Restarting one furnace costs around $50 million. Building a new one costs around $500 million.

And Ukraine went a full week in September without smelting a single tonne of steel. Vodoviz says that hasn't happened in a hundred years.

More than 15,000 people work across these three plants. They're all idle now.

ArcelorMittal says it expects a charge of around $1 billion, because its Krivoy Rih site and equipment are worth so much less now. Mauro Longobardo, the company's chief executive, says ArcelorMittal will focus on protecting what's left of the plant's infrastructure, so it can restart production whenever that becomes possible.

Nobody can say when that is. Vodoviz himself says repairs could take days, weeks, months or years.

And it's not just the big three.

Vodoviz says almost every steel plant in Ukraine has now been hit, including Interpipe and the Petrovskyi plant in Dnipro. Interpipe's own pipe rolling mill announced on 22 September that it was halting operations too.