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Lützerath: German coal mine stand off amid Ukraine war energy crunch

Authorities have given the protesters until Tuesday to leave the village

By Jenny Hill

BBC News, Lützerath

From her tiny wooden treehouse, which sways precariously in the winter wind, a young woman watches an enormous mechanical digger tear into the earth below, its jaws edging ever closer to the village which she's determined to save.

Lützerath, in western Germany, is on the verge - literally - of being swallowed up by the massive coal mine on its doorstep.

Around 200 climate change activists, who are now all that stand in the way of the diggers expanding the Garzweiler opencast mine, have been warned that if they don't leave by Tuesday they'll be forcibly evicted.

It's why they've taken to the trees, Bente Opitz explains.

"It's a lot harder for the police to evict us," she says. "We have ropes between the treehouses so we can move from one to another."

But the protesters are busy at ground level too. Young men and women, many with scarves masking their faces, reinforce makeshift barricades and load wheelbarrows with bricks.

Scorch marks on the road at the entrance to the village are evidence of a skirmish with police officers last week.

The land around and under Lützerath is rich in lignite - the dirtiest form of coal. The mine, a bleak and dull brown man-made canyon which stretches over 35 square kilometres, yields 25 million tonnes of the stuff every year.

The energy company RWE, which operates the mine, now owns the village. The residents are all gone, their houses abandoned. Only the protesters remain, squatting in the old brick buildings, watching the mine expand towards them.

The battle for Lützerath has been raging for a long time. But Russia's war on Ukraine has given it a greater significance, transforming it into a national symbol of the struggle within German politics and society; how does a country which relied so heavily on Russian gas, now balance its need for energy with its ambitions on climate change?