More than likely it’s a cost issue, coal is artificially cheap thanks to several countries subsidizing the coal industry like Germany, USA and Australia.
There’s also I guess the practical question of how much plant fiber per ton of metallurgical coal is needed, i.e. how land would be dedicated towards ‘producing plant fiber’ for the steel industry.
OSCE had a mission through the entire period 2014-2022 as observers and released daily reports of the region together with ceasefire violations so we can find it for pretty much any day online like this one from 2022-02-03, and you can look up others here.
I can’t find it anymore but there was a video floating around of Zelensky inspecting the troops and telling them to stop attacking the DNR and the soldiers telling him straight up no. Although I can’t find that video you can look at the election results from 2019, Zelensky ran on a platform of brokering a peace calming tensions with ethnic russians and general prosperity which is why Poroshenko accused Zelenski of selling out to Russia. A ton of people in eastern ukraine wanted things to calm down and that’s why he got the most votes there, but the military and the neo-nazi paramilitaries kept on doing their thing and here we are.