“Monkeys with a grenade”: inside the nuclear-power station on Ukraine’s front line

Boris loved his job working with technicians at the nuclear-power station in Zaporizhia. Born in 1968 in Poltava, a city in central Ukraine, he studied nuclear engineering at the university of Kharkiv before moving to Enerhodar, a city in the south of the country, built to house workers at the Zaporizhia power station. He joined the plant at an exciting time. “The field of nuclear energy stood for progress,” he said. “Something new.”

Before long he fell in love with a colleague named Ludmilla. The couple married and had two daughters. “I was happy…I studied new equipment, kept up-to-date with the developments of my profession. I was promoted up the career ladder. I had my beloved family, my work, my dacha. And then the war started.”

Zaporizhia nuclear-power station, Europe’s largest, fell into Russian hands in the first days of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. This April a drone reportedly exploded on the roof of one of the reactors. The Russians blamed the Ukrainians; the Ukrainians said it was a Russian “false-flag” operation. After the explosion, one of many such incidents over the past two years, Rafael Grossi, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said: “We are getting dangerously close to a nuclear accident.”

The IAEA has had observers at the station since summer 2022, but its access is restricted by the Russian army, whose armoured vehicles are parked in the turbine halls. Petro Kotin, head of EnergoAtom, the Ukrainian nuclear authority, is worried that the plant, now poorly maintained and dangerously near the front line, risks deteriorating to the point where it has to be decommissioned. Nuclear fuel on site has exceeded its expiration date. “We could lose this plant for ever,” he said. “Nobody knows what to do next. No other nuclear-power plant has gone beyond these limits.”

Meanwhile, intermittent rocket fire frequently cuts off the electricity supply. There are diesel-powered back-up generators, but no one is sure how much diesel remains on site. If the generators ran out of fuel during a power cut, there could be a “meltdown like Fukushima”, said Kotin.

All six reactors are currently in cold-shutdown mode, meaning they are not producing any energy and don’t contain any fuel. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t work to be done. It is impossible to mothball a nuclear facility like a “pasta factory”, said Kotin. Cooling systems to stop spent fuel from overheating need to be monitored and maintained.

Before the invasion, 11,000 people worked at the plant. Over the past two years, half of them have fled to Ukrainian-held territory. A quarter still live in Enerhodar but are banned from the plant because they refused to sign a contract with RosAtom, the Russian nuclear-energy agency that now controls the plant. There are now around 4,000 workers there – the remainder of the original employees joined by new hires, many of whom lack technical qualifications, according to Kotin. Only a fraction of the original shift leaders and senior technical staff remain.

Boris left Enerhodar last autumn, six months before the drone attack, and is now living in Poltava. His wife is still working at the plant. I met Boris in early April. He had a kind, avuncular face with a salt-and-pepper beard. He held his arms across his chest and stomach, as though he was protecting himself. Occasionally his voice faltered and he let out a long, mournful sigh. He was, he said, “overwhelmed by my memories”.

The Russians reached Enerhodar on March 3rd 2022. Several thousand residents massed at a barrier to block the advance. It was to no avail. Having overrun the defences, the Russians attacked the power station. A short battle ensued and three Ukrainian defenders were killed.

Most of the employees continued to work at the plant, though in those first febrile days many sent their families to safety in Ukrainian-held territory. Boris led a team of ten technicians (he didn’t want to give details about the nature of his work, as he worried about Ludmilla’s safety if he was identifiable). “My department needed me,” he said. “Someone had to continue to work at the power plant, to keep the world safe from nuclear disaster.”

Crucially, said Kotin, the head of EnergoAtom, 143 of the top engineers and managers remained on site. They were soon joined by a few engineers from RosAtom, the Russian agency. Kotin said that at first the RosAtom staff didn’t interfere with the running of the plant, only observed and asked questions. Although it was built in Soviet times, the plant had undergone significant changes since Ukrainian independence in 1991 – for example, it now ran partly on American nuclear fuel.

The Russians began to exert control in other ways. Workers were searched at the gate of the plant, and patrols routinely stopped people on the street in Enerhodar to scroll through their phones for pro-Ukrainian images. Boris said people took to carrying dumbphones. Squads of soldiers randomly banged on doors and searched apartments. “You could be lucky or unlucky,” said Boris, who endured three of these searches.

Early in the occupation, the Russians banned mobile phones from the plant and blocked Ukrainian networks in the region. Employees were able to communicate with EnergoAtom via the plant’s internal communication network – but the Russians were able to monitor this. Many workers called EnergoAtom managers in Kyiv from home; those who lived on the higher floors of apartment blocks could sometimes get signal from a Ukrainian network from across the river. Until September 2022, EnergoAtom remained in operational control of the Zaporizhia plant.

Boris had two phones: a “clean one” and another, kept hidden at home, which he used to call his daughters in Kyiv (one was already living there; the other had left Enerhodar a month into the occupation). He also used it to send information to EnergoAtom managers via Telegram.

People regularly disappeared into “the basement”  beneath the local police station where Russian intelligence officers carried out interrogations. Boris knew many of those arrested: market traders arrested for selling vodka (the Russians had banned hard liquor to stop their soldiers from getting drunk); young men suspected of knowing where the town’s stash of Kalashnikovs was hidden; an elderly female acquaintance; and colleagues from the power plant. Some returned after a few days; others were held for longer. Some were beaten and given electric shocks. One man’s bruises were so lurid, said Boris, that he looked like a creature from the film “Avatar”.

In the late spring of 2022, the Russian authorities found texts in support of Ukraine on Boris’s phone. He was taken to the police station and locked in a small cell designed to house two prisoners; more than a dozen men were packed in. They slept on the floor, some next to the hole in the floor that served as their toilet.

“Better not to talk about it,” Boris said when I asked if he had been beaten. “But that first time I managed to avoid cruel treatment. I was lucky.” Two weeks later he was freed and went back to work. Ludmilla was worried for him. “After I was arrested, she told me I was an idiot, that I should stay at home and not get involved.” His wife is “pro-Russian”, he told me with a wry smile. “I don’t know how to explain it,” he said, hugging himself tighter. “She understands the occupation is bad, but she doesn’t believe what our Ukrainian media write.”

Intense fighting in the area caused an electricity blackout in September 2022. “Every [electrical] line was damaged, so there was no connection to the Ukrainian system,” said Kotin. For the first time, diesel generators were deployed as back-up. Scared about the possibility of a nuclear meltdown, EnergoAtom managers directed plant employees to shut down the remaining two operational reactors.

At the end of the month, Ihor Murashov, the head of the plant, was arrested by the FSB (Russian intelligence). They allegedly put a bag over his head, handcuffed him and kept him in solitary confinement. He was released several days later, after Grossi, the head of the IAEA, intervened. Shaken and weak, Murashov was sent to Ukrainian-held territory.

After sham referendums that September, Russia annexed the occupied regions and on October 5th, Putin signed a decree appropriating the Zaporizhia nuclear plant as Russian state property. Yuri Chernichuk, a Ukrainian who had been the acting chief engineer, signed the RosAtom contract and was promoted to head of the plant. Kotin told me that he sent him an order to restart one of the reactors, in order to test what would happen. “The next day there was a report through my staff that he wouldn’t do it because it had been forbidden by the RosAtom management. After that it was clear we didn’t control the plant anymore.”

On social media Chernichuk wrote that he had placed his hand on the warm wall of reactor number four, on which he had worked at the start of his career, and asked the machine whether he should stay on or resign. Chernichuk said he realised it was his duty to take charge and maintain the safety of the plant. Ukrainian prosecutors have since charged him and several other senior managers with collaboration.

“Chernichuk? I didn’t like him,” said Kotin. “I would never have put him in this position [head of the plant].” He recalled testy telephone conversations with Chernichuk before he was promoted. “He would say something like: ‘You have just forgotten us here, you don’t help us, why should we report to you? Why should we follow your orders?’”

From the end of 2022, the plant grew more unstable. Leaks of water and boron, a chemical used to control nuclear reactions, were detected. Engineers tried to maintain some power to the site and neighbouring Enerdohar by toggling three of the reactors between hot shutdown, when some electricity is generated, and cold shutdown.

The Russian authorities at the plant grew emboldened. Before, when RosAtom managers had made a request for equipment, Boris, not wanting to help the occupiers, had been able to stall by invoking bureaucratic procurement procedures. Now soldiers would arrive in his office and demand the equipment. He said that one of them told him: “You don’t understand. Everything belongs to Russia now. We will take what we want.”

They applied pressure on workers to get Russian passports and to sign contracts with RosAtom, promising them bonuses if they did so. “The Russians considered themselves as liberators,” said Vasyl, the head of Boris’s department. “They wanted to show that people are loyal to them, and signed contracts of their own free will.”

Employees were divided. Some worried about losing their jobs if they did not sign; others about being prosecuted for collaboration by Ukrainian authorities in the future if they did. For those like Boris, signing the contract was akin to openly siding with Russia. When the carrot of the bonus didn’t work, FSB agents visited the homes of key technicians. Some were sent to the basement.

Three people on Boris’s team signed the contract. He distanced himself from them: “You’ve known these people for 20 or 30 years, and now you see them as traitors. It’s difficult to talk to them, even when you are in the same room.”

One day a RosAtom manager came to Vasyl’s office with a contract. After he demurred, Chernichuck and two other senior managers tried to convince him to sign. They were calm at first, then they started shouting and threatening him. He called in sick the next day and never went back to work. Faced with working under a replacement they didn’t respect, around half of Vasyl’s department quit, including Boris.

Technical expertise was being hollowed out all over the plant. Russian engineers who could be persuaded to move to a nuclear-power plant in the middle of a war zone were often low grade; Boris told me he saw empty vodka bottles in bins near their quarters in the plant’s nuclear bunker. Workers recruited from the surrounding countryside were unqualified. Kotin described them as “like a monkey with a grenade”.

In Enerhodar life was becoming increasingly difficult. It was hard to call an ambulance, see a doctor or get a prescription if you didn’t have a Russian passport. And although plant employees who hadn’t signed the Russian contract were still being paid by EnergoAtom, they could not get hold of the money because it was in Ukrainian hryvnia – the local currency was now roubles and Russian authorities had clamped down on money changers.

While Boris stayed at home, Ludmilla carried on going to work. When someone leaked a list on Telegram of employees who had signed the contract, Boris saw his wife’s name. “I was shocked. I told her I would divorce her. After that we lived in different rooms in the apartment. We didn’t talk. We tried to avoid each other. After some time, she came to me crying and asked me to forgive her. She said maybe she had made a mistake; she had not thought enough about it before signing. But there was no way back, there was no way to change the situation.”

He said he didn’t know if he could forgive her. “I don’t know how to answer this question, even to myself,” he told me. After a while they started talking again: “But the relationship was not like it was before.”

Boris knew of one family where the father and daughter had signed the contract, while the son had fled to Germany with his own family. In another, the husband had signed and the wife had left for Ukrainian-held territory; their son was serving in the Ukrainian army. He knew Russians who were pro-Ukrainian, Ukrainians who were pro-Russian, and those who said they didn’t care who was in charge as long as they kept their jobs.

Throughout the spring and summer of 2023 Boris and many of his colleagues waited hopefully for the much-touted Ukrainian counter-offensive to liberate Enerhodar and the Zaporizhia plant. Meanwhile Russian soldiers stationed there posted videos online of them jogging around the turbine halls. Occasionally wild boars exploded in the minefields the Russians had laid around the site.

The Ukrainian summer offensive stalled; very few gains were made on the Zaporizhia front. Despondent and fearful, more people decided to leave Enerhodar. The only route was east: through occupied Ukraine into Russia and then looping west, to the Baltic states, down through Poland and back into Ukraine. People posted travel advice and the best routes on Telegram; guides charged several hundred euros to help Ukrainians navigate the checkpoints.

In September 2023 FSB agents searched Boris’s and Ludmilla’s apartment. (Boris believes someone told the Russians about his pro-Ukrainian views.) They found his secret phone under a sofa cushion and a blue-and-yellow T-shirt.

He was taken to the police station. “They brought me into a room and placed my palms on the table and attached an electric wire to two of my fingers connected to a field telephone. One soldier stood behind me. They began to interrogate me, and asked why I was not working, why was I pro-Ukrainian, why hadn’t I signed the contract. When they switched on the electricity, the soldier behind me punched me in the back of the ribs.”

Under duress, Boris agreed he would apply for a Russian passport and stop visiting Ukrainian websites. “I promised a lot of things. After two hours they freed me.” He was so exhilarated at being released that he ran all the way home, despite the excruciating pain from his bruised ribs.

When he got back Ludmilla told him: “I can’t survive if you are taken a third time. Please, you have to leave,” But she refused to go with him. “We cried when we said goodbye,” said Boris. “I told her I would come back for sure. She said she would be waiting.”

Boris got in his car and joined a small convoy heading east. At the Enerhodar checkpoint he said he was going to the seaside; at the checkpoint near Mariupol he said he was going to visit friends in Volgograd, a city in southern Russia (he had asked a Russian family there, whom he knew through a relative, to corroborate the alibi). The convoy crossed the border without incident and drove through Russia, Estonia and Poland. “When I crossed the border and saw the Ukrainian flag I fell to my knees,” Boris said, tears welling.

He and his daughters have tried to convince Ludmilla to leave Enerhodar. He doesn’t know why she refuses to do so. “She understands there is an occupation, but I can’t explain it exactly – she doesn’t see it as such a big problem as I see it. She is a very strong woman.” He managed a half-smile. “Very stubborn.”

Boris loves his wife and still speaks to her. He told me he can hear the loneliness in her voice. “She misses her daughters. She misses me. She understands the situation we are now in and she knows we can’t change it.” Ludmilla doesn’t talk, he says, about the future, and they don’t talk about their relationship. “It’s just clear that she is there, and I am here.” ■

Wendell Steavenson has reported extensively on the war in Ukraine for 1843 magazine. Some details have been changed to protect Boris’s identity