At least 32 miners were killed Wednesday in an explosion in Zasyadko mine in the Donetsk region, Ukraine’s state-run Ukrinform news agency reported.
Speaker Volodymyr Groysman announced the toll in a statement to Parliament and called for a moment’s silence, Ukrinform said.
The explosion occurred just before 6 a.m. local time, when there were 230 people at the mine, the official website for Donetsk City said.
Of those, 157 were evacuated in the initial hours after the blast, including 14 injured and one dead, it said. Fifteen rescue teams are working at the scene, it added.
The website of the pro-government Donetsk regional authority said 50 people were 1,200 meters (3,937 feet) underground at the time of the methane blast.
Thirty-two people are still missing, it said.
Ukrainian rescue workers are willing to help out in the operation in rebel-held territories, the regional authority added.
The official news agency of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, DAN, earlier reported that one miner had been killed and another 73 were trapped underground. It’s not yet clear how many people are still believed trapped.
Preliminary information indicates the explosion at the Zasyadko mine in the Donetsk region was caused by methane gas, DAN said.
“This did not happen because of shelling,” an emergency services official told DAN.
Dozens of miners were killed and injured in a methane explosion in the same mine in 2007.
Donetsk and the neighboring Luhansk region are at the center of a months-long conflict between pro-Russia separatists and Ukrainian government forces.
A shaky ceasefire is currently in place in the region.
