Vladimir Putin had done his homework.
He knew the layout of the nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine, the source of the water that cools its reactors, and the high-voltage cables that move its electricity. He knew where a shell had recently exploded, punching a hole in the roof of a building, and where a fire had started while Russian troops seized the facility in the spring of 2022. He also knew, perhaps better than anyone, how dangerous it had been to turn the plant into a battleground.
“He knew it all very precisely,” says Rafael Grossi, the head of the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). “Not just in general terms. He knew it all down to the technical details.” Grossi has met with Putin several times to discuss the standoff at the nuclear power plant, which remains under the control of Russian forces in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region. Their first meeting, held in a palace outside St. Petersburg in October 2022, led Grossi to conclude that the plant plays an outsize role in Putin’s military strategy. “It’s become larger than life,” he tells me.
Even the basic details of the situation can sound like the clumsy plot of some apocalyptic thriller. An invading army has seized Europe’s largest nuclear plant, taken thousands of its employees hostage, and turned the grounds—home to a large stockpile of nuclear fuel—into a forward operating base in the middle of an active war zone. None of these facts are in serious dispute. They have been confirmed by satellite imagery, eyewitness testimony, U.N. nuclear inspectors, direct statements from Russian officials, and footage taken inside the plant.
For Putin, the Zaporizhzhia plant serves as a valuable asset, one that can be traded to extract concessions from the West. In the eyes of the Ukrainians and many of their allies, the situation looks not just bleak but exceptionally dangerous. The crisis is playing out in the same country that produced the worst nuclear catastrophe in human history: the 1986 explosion of Reactor 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, a short drive north of Kyiv. That disaster was caused by a series of technical mistakes and shoddy engineering. The present crisis in Zaporizhzhia, on the other hand, was created by Putin, who ordered the occupation of the plant nearly four years ago. Since then, none of the world’s great powers or international institutions have been able to loosen the Russian leader’s hold on it.
Grossi, the head of one of these institutions, admits as much. From his office in Vienna, where we met for an interview last year, the Argentine diplomat and IAEA chief has tried to keep the Zaporizhzhia plant on the agenda of the U.N. But he has largely failed. The matter barely came up during the most recent gathering of the General Assembly in September. Instead, as world leaders gathered at U.N. headquarters in New York City, the nuclear plant in southern Ukraine lurched toward a crisis. On the evening of Sept. 23, intense fighting near Zaporizhzhia cut off the plant’s external power supply. It was the 10th such blackout since Russia took over the facility, and it caused barely a blip on the global news agenda. Only about a week later, when the duration of the outage exceeded the previous ones, did it begin to make headlines.
Nuclear experts, including Grossi and his team at the IAEA, have insisted that the risks to nuclear safety at the plant remain dangerously high. In 2022, the Russians placed the plant into what’s known as a cold shutdown, and its reactors have not produced electricity since. But amid the blackout, the systems used to cool the reactors have run on emergency backup generators. If those systems fail—or simply run out of diesel—the plant would have no way to stop the nuclear fuel inside those reactors from overheating and potentially melting down.
The Trump Administration, in its ongoing talks with Grossi and both of the warring sides in Ukraine, has tried to arrange for the power supply to be restored, a senior U.S. official tells TIME. “The Russians have agreed to it. The Ukrainians now have recently agreed to it. Grossi’s team is fixing it right now,” the Administration official said in an interview on Oct. 17. The following day, Grossi confirmed that these repairs were underway. Although they would take “some time” to complete, he added, “there is now finally some light at the end of the tunnel.”
But restoring those power lines will not resolve the broader stalemate over the future of the reactors. Without a deal to end the war, they will remain on the front line, susceptible to the fighting that continues to rage around the power plant. Grossi, in his recent statements, has made that clear. The emergency power supply to the facility remains its “last line of defense,” he said on the seventh day of the most recent blackout. “It is clearly not a sustainable situation in terms of nuclear safety.”
Sustainable or not, the situation has become the status quo, a slow-motion catastrophe that only one man has the power to stop. But Putin has shown no willingness to release his grip on the power plant. And his peers have chosen to let the question fester, pretending the battle for control of a nuclear power plant does not qualify as an emergency in a world gone deaf from the ringing of alarms.
The Russians made their first attempt to seize the Zaporizhzhia plant during the opening days of the invasion. Their tanks and armored columns were moving north from Crimea toward the Ukrainian heartland, along the Dnipro River. The nuclear facility stands on a bend in that river, anchoring the town of Energodar, which had a population of just over 50,000 people at the time.
Many of them, including thousands of the plant’s employees and their family members, managed at first to block the advance of the Russian forces. They dug up the back roads into town and built improvised barricades, blocking the highway with slabs of concrete and piles of old tires. “Our aim was not to let them rush in like a blitzkrieg,” says Oleg Orlov, the mayor of Energodar, who helped organize these efforts.
For several days, it worked. The invaders did not fire at the crowds of unarmed locals manning the makeshift barriers. But on the evening of March 3, 2022, the Russians returned with orders to seize the facility by force. Their ensuing battle against a detachment of Ukrainian troops lasted through the night and into the following morning, with the Russians firing heavy machine guns and shells toward the nuclear plant, setting one of its administrative buildings on fire. Orlov went into hiding, doing his best to organize supplies of food, medicine, and, when possible, evacuations for Energodar’s residents.
As they took control, the Russian commanders tried at first to keep the population calm. They needed the plant’s staff to continue working. The invaders did not know how to operate the reactors; most of the Russian troops had never seen the inside of a nuclear power plant before. Pacing around the control room with their rifles, they looked like hijackers who had barged into the cockpit with no idea how to fly.
One of their leaders, a colonel of the Russian National Guard named Sergei Dovgan, began to act as the commandant of the surrounding town. He and his comrades imposed a price of around $700 for civilians to leave Energodar, and his men collected these bribes at the checkpoint leading out of town, according to Ukrainian investigators and locals who witnessed the practice. At the same time, Dovgan tried to control the most rampant abuses his troops committed, fearing they might cause his hold over the townspeople to slip. In one phone call intercepted by the Ukrainian intelligence services and shared with TIME, Dovgan discusses incidents in which his troops engaged in “marauding” and “terrorizing” civilians. “I’m going to work on it,” Dovgan says, according to a transcript of the call. “Keep it quiet.”
Things changed about two weeks into the occupation of Energodar, when agents of the FSB, Russia’s main intelligence service, began to assert a tighter hold over the town. The use of violence and torture became systematic, according to Ukrainian investigators and victims of these abuses. Among those victims was Ivan Samoydyuk, the deputy mayor of Energodar. In the middle of March 2022, the Russian occupying forces allowed him to leave town for a couple of days to pick up a truckload of food and medicine in a nearby city that remained under Ukrainian control. His wife and children were not allowed to leave with him, ensuring that he would not try to escape.
Upon his return, the deputy mayor distributed the aid to local residents. He was driving home when a group of Russian troops pulled him over, bundled him into a car, and placed a bag over his head, according to Samoydyuk. He says he spent the next 323 days in their custody, first in an isolation cell in the occupied city of Melitopol and later in a filthy garage converted into a makeshift prison nearby. His captors held him incommunicado, routinely beat him, and deprived him of food and sleep, he told me in an interview after his release.
“It was impossible to sleep,” he says of the first prison, where he was held for 135 days. “As soon as you began dozing off, the sounds of torture from one of the nearby cells would start up again.” (Samoydyuk declined to discuss the means of torture he alleges were used against him, saying that he “did not want to relive” what was done to him.)
The aim of his captors, Samoydyuk says, was to turn him into a collaborator, so that he might go back to Energodar and persuade its people to accept the Russian occupation. The Russians were especially intent on winning the cooperation of the power plant’s nuclear engineers and other employees. They tried to entice Russian nuclear scientists to come work in the war zone, but few volunteered. So the plant’s Ukrainian engineers were forced to continue working as hostages. The Russians ordered them to renounce their Ukrainian citizenship and accept Russian passports, according to investigators and witnesses of these events.
Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear corporation, took over management of the plant in the spring of 2022. (The company declined numerous requests for interviews.) Its reactors were shut down, which stopped the generation of power and lowered the risk of a catastrophic meltdown. But the engineers still need to cool the nuclear fuel inside those reactors by pumping water over it in a constant cycle. If the fuel rods were to overheat, they could explode, potentially causing a release of radiation that could spread with the wind in any direction. Any threat to these cooling systems, Grossi told me, “puts the safety and security of the plant at risk. It makes the functioning of many safety aspects of the plant very difficult.”
For the Ukrainian leadership in Kyiv, the occupation of the power plant marked a singular moment of terror and helplessness in a year that had plenty of both. On the night it started, aides to President Volodymyr Zelensky stayed up late in their command center, a fortified bunker deep beneath the presidential compound in Kyiv. News from the power plant reached them in the early hours of the morning, as two of Zelensky’s aides sat in the bunker’s conference room, drinking whiskey with cola and monitoring the news.
One of them, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, noticed the distress messages coming from the power plant. Tymoshenko pulled up a video feed from the plant’s security cameras on his computer. It showed the Russian assault in real time. “They were just blasting it with their tanks,” Tymoshenko told me later. Machine-gun rounds showed up as white streaks on the screen, and he could hear the managers of the facility using a loudspeaker to broadcast a message to the attackers: “Stop shooting immediately! You are threatening the security of the whole world!”
At the time, a small detachment of troops from Ukraine’s National Guard were stationed at the power plant. Tymoshenko got their commander on the phone, and ran to find his bosses in the bunker. “I was going around the corridors, looking for people, and I came across the President,” Tymoshenko says. He recalls telling Zelensky, “There’s tanks shooting at the nuclear power plant. There’s a battle going on.”
The President could not deploy reinforcements. Ukraine’s military units were engaged along other sectors of the front line, which stretched for nearly a thousand miles at the time across the north, east, and south of Ukraine. Zelensky saw only one way of influencing the situation. Before dawn in Kyiv, he prepared a statement, sat down at his computer in the bunker, and read it aloud: “Europeans, please wake up! For the first time in our history, in the history of humanity, a terrorist state has resorted to nuclear terrorism.”
News of the assault spread around the world, and protesters condemned it in a handful of European cities. From the bunker, Zelensky addressed several gatherings via video link, including the demonstration held in Vienna, where the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog is based. Grossi soon released a statement of his own. The Russian attack, he said, created “unprecedented danger” of a nuclear calamity.
But the IAEA, whose typical work involves inspecting nuclear facilities around the world, had no playbook for such a scenario. Its experts worked hard to prepare for a variety of disasters, such as a freak weather event, a terrorist attack, or an airplane accidentally crashing into a reactor. But they had never imagined a nuclear power plant ending up on the front lines of a war. “In terms of having a full plan, no, it was never predicted or foreseeable,” Grossi told me. “In those initial hours,” he added, “we were fearing an accident. We were fearing a battle for the plant.”
The fiercest battle for control of the plant took place that summer, about half a year into the Russian occupation, when Ukrainian forces tried to seize it back. Under the cover of night, a flotilla of boats, some of them commandeered from local fishermen, tried to cross the Dnipro and land on the embankment near the plant, according to three Ukrainian military officers involved in the planning and execution of the assault.
One of the officers, a special-forces commando who discussed the operation on condition of anonymity, recalls lying in the pitch-dark belly of a river barge alongside dozens of his comrades, all of them armed to the hilt, eyeing one another through night-vision goggles. The wait lasted hours, he says, but the boat never made it across. The initial waves of the Ukrainian assault were not able to gain a foothold on the opposite side of the river. “Eventually we got the orders to pull back,” says the officer. “The mission failed.”
By chance, Grossi and some of his colleagues from the IAEA arrived in Ukraine just as that mission was under way. Stepping off the train at Kyiv’s central station, the team rode to the presidential compound to meet Zelensky in the hope of securing his blessing to make a trip to the plant. The President resisted the idea. He worried that a visit from a U.N. agency could be seen as legitimizing the Russian occupation, according to a senior Ukrainian official who took part in the meeting. Zelensky also wanted the U.N., rather than acting as mediators or neutral observers, to demand that the Russians withdraw from the facility.
Grossi pushed back. He told Zelensky the IAEA has no authority to make such demands. The agency answers to the U.N. Security Council, where Russia has veto power over key decisions. Grossi could not appear to take sides in the war. “We needed to be objective,” he says. When Zelensky insisted, Grossi explained that the agency is devoted to nuclear safety, not conflict resolution. His core mission would be to inspect any damage to the plant and to assess the danger of a nuclear accident. He also hoped to establish a permanent team of U.N. observers who would stay behind to keep an eye on the facility. That would be impossible without approval from both the Russian forces and the Ukrainians.
After hours of talks, Zelensky relented, allowing the IAEA team to proceed. Upon their arrival in the city of Zaporizhzhia, Grossi’s security detail went ahead to scout out the path to the nuclear power station. It led straight through the no-man’s-land between the Ukrainian and Russian positions. “It was not even a dirt road,” Grossi recalls. His bodyguards came back and told him the convoy would not be able to pass. Intense fighting had broken out in the area, with artillery fire and combat drones crisscrossing the sky. “There was a military operation,” Grossi says, “an attempt to storm the plant with amphibious forces crossing the river.”
After more than a day of delays, Grossi and his team managed to reach the Russian checkpoint, where a group of officers came out to greet them with a show of hospitality. They provided a military escort to the power plant, featuring Russian helicopters and combat vehicles riding in formation. “It was a very impressive scene,” Grossi recalls. “Very dramatic.”
Under the watch of Russian military officers, the U.N. officials took a tour of the plant and met with some of its Ukrainian staff. Nearly 5,000 employees, from cafeteria workers to nuclear physicists, had remained at their posts to keep the facility running safely. Many still wore the uniforms of Ukraine’s state nuclear company, Energoatom. “They were saying it’s a Ukrainian facility,” Grossi recalls, “and they are operating under the supervision of the Ukrainian regulator.”
The Russians tolerated such defiance in those early weeks of the occupation, and they allowed Grossi to set up a monitoring mission at the plant, with IAEA inspectors rotating in and out every few months. But they did not get permission to visit every part of the facility. Its control room, for instance, remained off-limits.
That first mission by the U.N. inspectors presaged the beginning of a stalemate that has endured for more than three years. It remains unclear whether Putin intends to restart the reactors and use the electricity to supply the parts of Ukraine that Russia had occupied, or whether he aims to trade the facility for more Ukrainian territory or other concessions. Persistent battles for the surrounding region of Zaporizhzhia have periodically cut off the power supply to the station itself. Each of those disruptions has led to statements of concern from the IAEA and calls for help from the Ukrainian authorities. But no one has been able to end the standoff.
After the latest blackout began in late September, the Ukrainian authorities accused the Russians of intentionally cutting off the plant from Ukraine’s power grid, with the possible goal of trying to connect it to high-voltage lines belonging to Russia. “Moscow tries to fool the IAEA and the whole technical and diplomatic community by pretending that the problem is caused by anyone other than itself,” said Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha.
Throughout the war, the power plant has remained one of Putin’s most valuable sources of leverage over the Ukrainians in the halting efforts to secure a ceasefire. Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump has spoken with Putin several times about the nuclear power plant, both by phone and in person, according to official readouts of these conversations. After one of these talks in March, Trump suggested that the U.S. could take command of the plant from the Russians. The U.S., Trump said, “could be very helpful in running those plants with its electricity and utility expertise.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio later clarified that the idea had also been discussed with President Zelensky. “American ownership of those plants would be the best protection for that infrastructure and support for Ukrainian energy infrastructure,” Rubio said in a statement in March. The following month, Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy in talks with the Kremlin, discussed the idea with Putin, and included it in a proposed “framework” for peace in Ukraine. The proposal, which Witkoff showed to European diplomats, suggested that Ukraine would regain at least some level of formal ownership of the facility, but that it would function under “U.S. control and administration,” according to a copy of the offer published by Reuters. The electricity produced at the plant, it said, would then be “distributed to both sides.” Yet the Ukrainians have rejected any plan that leaves the facility even partly in Russian hands. As part of any future peace deal, Zelensky may need to accept a “sharing relationship on the amount of energy” that comes out of the power plant, the senior official from the Trump Administration told TIME on Oct. 17. That remains a central part of the peace process the White House is pursuing.
But as those talks have moved forward in fits and starts, Russian forces have continued to use the plant’s grounds as a military fortress, according to U.N. inspectors and other witnesses. They have dotted the perimeter with mines, stockpiled weapons, and garrisoned troops inside. A video posted online by one of the Russian occupiers appeared to show rows of military vehicles parked within a turbine hall. For Putin and his generals, the plant served as a foothold from which to push deeper into southern Ukraine.
Those efforts have mostly failed. North of the Dnipro River, the region of Zaporizhzhia remains under Ukrainian control. But the towns and cities nearest to the nuclear plant have found themselves under relentless bombardment from Russian artillery, missiles, and combat drones. Many of the strikes appear to originate from the area around the power plant. “They use us for target practice,” says Yevhen Yevtushenko, the former mayor of Nikopol, which sits directly across the river from the plant.
When I visited Yevtushenko last year, he took me up to the roof of city hall to have a look at the nuclear plant in the distance, its cooling towers on the horizon a few miles away. The streets below looked deserted. Nearly all residents of Nikopol had fled, because the constant threat of attacks from the air made it dangerous for them to venture out of their homes. Russian drones had started targeting civilians, Yevtushenko told me. That week, one of them had flown into a woman’s garage as she parked her car inside. The explosion killed her.
Even if the Ukrainian military had no chance of liberating the plant by force, Yevtushenko hoped the U.N. observers stationed there could at least pressure the Russians to stop firing at his town. Walking over to a cabinet in his office, he pulled out a piece of shrapnel about the size of a walnut. It had flown through his window and gotten lodged in the ceiling after a Russian missile strike. Yevtushenko asked me to give it to Grossi.
The following week, when I visited the IAEA headquarters in Vienna, the memento struck the agency’s director as a personal rebuke. Rolling it around in his hand, Grossi thanked me for passing it along and asked me to send a message in response. The IAEA could not end the occupation of the nuclear plant. Nor could it force the Russians to stop using the facility as a launching ground for their attacks. But that did not make the mission of the U.N. monitors any less valuable, Grossi told me.
“If you are from Nikopol, you don’t want to see a nuclear accident taking place on the other side of the river,” he said. The IAEA and its staff were committed to preventing such a catastrophe, and they were putting their lives on the line to prevent it. “I think this is very important, and we will continue,” Grossi said. Looking down at the piece of shrapnel in his hand, he added, “This story is being written day by day. We don’t know the ending yet.”
—With reporting by Eric Cortellessa/Washington
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