Days after the Trump administration floated the idea of assuming control of Ukraine’s embattled Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant as part of the nascent peace deal the US is trying to broker between Kyiv and the Kremlin, Russia’s foreign ministry has pushed back, warning the US to keep its hands to itself.
The bluntly worded statement released last week offers one of the first outright claims of ownership to the plant iterated by the Russian side since its troops overran it in early 2022. The Foreign Ministry’s remarks go on to describe the plant not as something captured by Moscow from Ukraine, but rather as real-estate Russia is simply repatriating, offering a notable glimpse into what conditions the Kremlin may demand of any lasting peace deal.
Since its capture, the ZNPP has sat perilously close to the frontlines of the biggest war in Europe since World War II. Though its reactors have been idled to avoid a larger nuclear accident should they suffer a direct hit, the plant’s outside power sources— necessary to keep the reactors cool and prevent meltdowns—have been repeatedly cut in military skirmishes. In August, a drone struck the cooling tower of one of the plant’s reactors, casting into bold relief the plant’s precarious position.
The International Atomic Energy Agency—which has warned repeatedly of the dangers of fighting a war around a nuclear power plant—has proven unable to keep the plant safe, though its on-site inspectors report regularly on near misses.
The possibility of the US assuming control of the ZNPP, which operates six reactors, had initially arisen during a telephone conversation between Donald Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky, both leaders confirmed last week.
But Russia has other ideas.
“ZNPP is a Russian nuclear facility,” wrote the Russian Foreign Ministry, referring to the abbreviation for the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. “The return of the plant to Russia’s nuclear sector is a long-established fact—one the international community simply has to acknowledge.”
It added that: “Transferring the plant itself, or control over it, to Ukraine or any other country is out of the question.”
In the following days, Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear corporation, which previously had been reluctant to acknowledge its oversight of the plant following the invasion, published plans on restarting the ZNPP in its weekly PR newsletter—also a first.
According to Alexander Nikitin, one of Bellona’s nuclear experts, the vice grip Moscow has on Zaporizhzhia plant tracks with changes in the Russian constitution that recognize the Zaporizhzhia Region, where the plant is located, as Russian territory—regardless of what the Ukrainians have to say about it.
“The ZNPP is lost for Ukraine, but while a ‘hot’ war continues, it will not be put into operation without the risk of organizing a nuclear-radiation collapse,” he said.
If it does eventually produce electricity, Nikitin said, Russia would likely use it to power the regions it powered before to the war—the industrial Donbas region, which Russian forces have occupied, and Crimea, annexed by Moscow in 2014.
Like Ukraine’s three other Soviet-built nuclear stations, the Zaporizhzhia plant was ceded to Kyiv when the Soviet Union was dissolved, and Ukraine became an independent nation.
Since then, the plant has undergone numerous Westernizing revisions that have divorced it from the Russian nuclear industry, including computer updates sponsored by the European Union and a shift to burning nuclear fuels developed by the US nuclear giant Westinghouse. As a result, any reabsorption of the plant into the Russian nuclear industry would be a daunting technological task.
“Russia will have to somehow settle relations with the American company whose nuclear fuel is currently loaded into four ZNPP reactors,” Nikitin said.
Beginning operations in 1985 while Ukraine was still a Soviet republic, the ZNPP was once viewed as a jewel of party engineering operating on then newly designed VVER reactors. A bustling company city called Enerhodar sprang up around it to house its one-time population of 11,000 workers and technicians and their families. The war has hollowed that population out, leaving mostly Russian workers transferred to the site, and a handful of Ukrainians, many of whom were forced to sign contracts with Rosatom.
