All 26 mines in the Karaganda region of the southern republic of Kazakhstan were shut down and miners made more than 70 demands, the government newspaper Izvestia reported.
A Karaganda steel plant director warned he had only a day's worth of coal reserves, and steelworkers in Pavlograd in the Donetsk Basin said they had only a two-day supply, newspapers reported.
Demands quickly escalated to include regional economic autonomy for the main mining regions, the Kuznetsk Basin, the Don River Basin in the Ukraine, Vorkuta in the far north and Karaganda in Kazakhstan.