With Ukraine's coal industry in crisis, miners are taking the law into their own hands.

Debt-ridden and plagued by high accident rates, official mines cannot pay out wages and many have been hit by strikes in the main mining region of Donetsk in south-eastern Ukraine.

So the miners have started to mine illegally, either by working old and disused shafts or scraping coal from the surface.

A dearth of jobs and no government benefits mean they have little choice.

The work's hellish but at least you can earn a crust of bread

Russian TV

Some coal is available at one hryvna a bucket - about 12 pence. High quality anthracite can be obtained from near the surface.

Coal mined from illegal pits is cheaper than coal from official mines, and the locals are glad to buy it.

What is more, the miners are paid in ready cash at the end of their shift. They can earn between �5 and �6 a day.

'Hellish'

"Lots of people scrape a living this way," a Russian TV correspondent reported from the area, where there are several hundred illegal mines.

Equipment is basic

"People aren't put off by the terrible conditions. The work's hellish but at least you can earn a crust of bread," the correspondent says.

She says there is no ventilation, shafts are no more than a metre high and the only equipment is a miner's pick.

Most miners asked the TV not to show their faces, fearing they might lose their only way of earning a living.

Who owns the illegal mines is not clear. "It's work, it's not important who the owner is," one miner said.

Sometimes the authorities move in with bulldozers to destroy the mines. But they soon spring up again.

"Bulldozers are no solution to the hopelessness, desperation and poverty of those forced to go down into these lairs every day to feed their children," Russian TV concluded.

BBC Monitoring, based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.