The employees of the metallurgical plant in Râbnița remain at home until January 20. Only service personnel will come to work. The company announced this, saying that the measure is aimed at reducing energy consumption, IPN reports.

Of the plant's more than 2,000 employees, around 50 workers go to work supervising the machines.

The Tiraspol administration had previously said that the January 1 gas cut-off had led to the closure of industrial enterprises on the left bank of the Dniester, with the exception of food producers. Some of them, including Elektromash, Odema and Intercenterlux, have resumed work at night.

About the fact that almost 2 500 employees of the plant remain unemployed, Chisinau Prime Minister Dorin Recean spoke about it as early as December 12, 2024, when he asked the Parliament to establish a state of emergency in the Republic of Moldova. At the time, the prime minister explained that the metallurgical plant in Ribnitsa could no longer be supplied with electricity because the Ukrainian station in Podolsk, through which the high-voltage power line that supplied it passed, had been bombed.

According to the plant's management, in December it was still rolling steel, but after January 1, when the energy crisis began, the electric furnace, which was using 95 megawatts per hour, was shut down. If this furnace had been left running, then the whole Transnistrian region would have been without electricity.