This article was originally published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and is reprinted with permission.
The vast windows of Yevhen Yevtushenko’s Soviet-era office overlook Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. Its round cooling towers stand less than 10 kilometers away, across a broad stretch of the Dnieper River that is now almost dry after a disastrous dam breach downstream.
A tough-looking man with a bushy beard, an air of mild irritation, and a pistol strung on his belt, Yevtushenko, who heads the Nikopol District Military Administration, offered his assessment of the chances of a nuclear disaster. “I do think it is very probable,” he told RFE/RL on July 3.
Yevtushenko was echoing alarming warnings from Ukrainian officials about the situation surrounding the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, which has been occupied by Russia since early March 2022, less than two weeks after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the large-scale invasion of Ukraine.
On June 23, Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, Major General Kyrylo Budanov, claimed that Russia had planted explosives at four of the plant’s six power-generation units and at the cooling system. Without providing evidence, he said that a Russian plan to detonate them had been “drafted and approved,” and that the only missing element was an order to do so.
On July 1, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said there was a “serious threat because Russia is technically ready to provoke a local explosion at the station” that could lead to a release of radiation. He said that “the situation is very dangerous.”
And late on July 4, the Ukrainian military’s General Staff said that “objects resembling explosive devices were placed on the outer roofs of the third and fourth power units” of the plant earlier that day. Detonating them would not damage the reactors, it said, but it suggested that Russia might blow them up and then claim the units were hit by Ukrainian fire.
Russian officials have increased the tension by claiming without evidence that Ukraine’s assertions indicate Kyiv is preparing to cause a catastrophe at the plant and blame it on Moscow.
“This is not a reality show but an impending disaster,” said Yevtushenko, who has an emblem of Ukrainian military intelligence hanging on a wall above his office desk. He added that “the reaction of the international community is strikingly feeble.”
The Zaporizhzhya plant is controlled by the Russian state company Rosatom but operated by Ukrainian staff and, since September 2022, partly accessible to experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN nuclear oversight body.
After an inspection on June 30, IAEA chief Rafael Grossi said that experts found no evidence of explosives placed recently at the facility but added that “they still need additional access to carry out further such checks at the site,” including parts of the turbine halls and cooling system.
Concerns of a deliberate disaster at the power station, or an accident caused by exchanges of fire, have been swirling for months. But fears intensified after the breach of the Kakhovka dam downstream on the Dnieper on June 6, which emptied most of the water from the Kakhovka Reservoir — the long, wide stretch of river on which the plant and the city that serves it, Enerhodar, are located.
Kyiv has blamed the breach on Russia, which has long controlled the now-destroyed dam and now stands accused of creating an environmental catastrophe in southern Ukraine, flooding towns, destroying farmland, killing residents along the river, and leaving up to 700,000 people in the region without access to clean water.
‘Nowhere To Go’
One of them, Viktoria Kutova, came to a water distribution point in Nikopol with a tray packed with big empty bottles on July 3, a sweltering Monday. Like about half the city’s pre-invasion population of 100,000, she has stayed home despite worsening living conditions.
“There’s a feeling that one would like to escape, but there is nowhere to go,” Kutova said. A month earlier, she said, she traveled to Poland to meet her daughter’s godmother, who flew there from Israel — but after one week, she returned and continued to work at a kindergarten and as a community volunteer.
Kutova said she will only leave Nikopol in the event of a nuclear disaster, asking: “Who needs us anywhere else?”
With the temperature rising above 30 degrees Celsius, the people lining up for water tried to keep up good spirits — Nikopol residents have been dubbed invincible due to their stamina over more than a year of attacks and tragedies, both collective and individual — but signs of apathy and despair are visible around the city.
Anton, a 12-year-old boy with dried-up scabs from sores on his face and hands, was pouring water into six 5-liter bottles. He came alone and did not know where his school friends were, he said in a timid, sad voice. He had been collecting water at the same spot every day for almost a month. “It is very heavy,” he said.
Halyna Blahodyna, a bacteriologist from the Nikopol water company who was overseeing the water collection point, said the residents of the city are weary and live from day to day. They have been informed about an evacuation plan in the event of a radiation leak, she said, and they follow the announcements of the authorities.
“I’ve been keeping iodine in my wallet near my heart since last November,” she said, adding: “I only hope we will have an Internet connection.”
In recent weeks some communities near the nuclear plant, including Nikopol, have held emergency drills to prepare for a disaster that could spread a radioactive cloud over the entire area.
Ukraine’s Armed Forces have worked on disaster-response plans with the country’s nuclear energy company, Enerhoatom. The secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, Oleksiy Danilov, said on July 3 that Ukraine is preparing for “any scenario.”
Yevtushenko said an evacuation plan for Nikopol is in place. But with 160,000 people to be potentially evacuated from the district, he foresees “panic and an element of chaos” in the event of a disaster — and worries that Russian forces might continue shelling during a civilian evacuation.
As it is, the Russian troops stationed across the Dnieper fire artillery at Nikopol almost every day. On July 2, authorities said Russian fire had struck Nikopol and the nearby town of Marhanets, wounding one civilian and damaging several buildings and vehicles.
Olha Onyshchuk, a 59-year-old resident of Nikopol, lost the family home she inherited from her mother as the result of the attack. She lives in a newer house couple of meters away and was lucky to stay alive, she said.
“We had no electricity in the winter. We have no water now. We sleep in a corridor and hide in the cellar,” she said. “I hope it will end soon, but what will be left here when it ends?”
According to Yevtushenko, at least 50 civilians in the Nikopol district have been killed and 233 wounded by artillery fire since the start of the large-scale invasion in February 2022. Some 2,000 private buildings and 900 apartment blocks have been destroyed or damaged, he said.
‘The Wind Has No Allies’
Yevtushenko argues that instead of talking about what to do in the event of a nuclear catastrophe, the international community should be talking about how to bring back security.
“We need to create a demilitarized zone here,” Yevtushenko said, raising the prospect that Russian forces could storm across the Dnieper riverbed once it is completely dry.
The opposite scenario of the Ukrainian Army advancing across the river as part of operations on the southern front is also possible: Securing the Russian-occupied nuclear plant would be a significant breakthrough in the counteroffensive Ukraine launched last month.
The fear of the former is widespread among residents of Nikopol, no longer separated from the Russian troops occupying the nuclear plant by a massive body of water. A month after the dam breach downstream, the Kakhovka Reservoir is almost empty, and the water level continues to decline.
Roman Padolkin and Yuriy Obukhov, two middle-aged men playing chess in the shade on the terrace at a local bar, say that any scenario is possible. The people in the bar, most of them elderly and visibly tired, stared numbly at the green walls and held only short scraps of conversation.
Padolkin, a native of Kherson, near the Dnieper delta to the southwest, moved to live in Nikopol after his apartment was destroyed by a Russian air attack following the liberation of the city by Ukrainian forces last autumn.
“I don’t know where to run or what to hold on to,” he said. “Putin’s biggest victory is that I could not wash the dishes for three weeks or flush the toilet in my flat.”
Obukhov said he hoped disaster would not strike, suggesting Russia might be wary of causing a radiation leak because “the wind has neither enemies nor allies.”
According to experts, the prevailing winds in the area blow to the southeast, meaning any radiation leak from the plant could drift directly across Russian troop positions and into the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don.
“But the breach of the dam left Crimea without water and flooded both banks,” Padolkin added after a while, referring to the devastating consequences the Dnieper flooding had on Russian-occupied areas of southern Ukraine.
“It’s not a chess game, it’s pure madness,” he said.
