A few hours after polls closed for “referenda” in Ukraine’s occupied oblasts last month, Russia-installed officials in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia oblast reported that 93.11 percent of votes cast there favored annexation. Within days Moscow had officially absorbed Zaporizhzhia into the Russian Federation and Russian president Vladimir Putin had declared the region’s embattled nuclear power plant—Europe’s largest—to be Russian property.
Never mind that a recent telephone survey of adults in Energodar, the city built to house Zaporizhzhia’s nuclear power staff, found only 6 percent support for joining Russia, according to Ukrainian nuclear power firm Energoatom. Or that Ukrainian forces control over a quarter of the region, including its capital. Or the referendum’s hasty organization, and reports of voter intimidation and other elections irregularities.
Russia Annexes Nuclear Station; Invites Sanctions
Claimed ownership of Ukrainian power plant bolsters case for embargoes on Russia's nuclear energy sector
spectrum.ieee.org
“Ambiguity about the command-and-control chain” makes the embattled facility’s security even more precarious according to a statement last week by Rafael Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Grossi noted the “enormous pressure” on staff, who face “extremely difficult” decisions for themselves and their families in the face of Rosatom’s and Energoatom’s conflicting demands.
In a highly unusual move, Grossi also took a side in the conflict for the first time since Russian forces seized Zaporizhzhia in March. Grossi told reporters in Kyiv that “the position of the IAEA is that this facility is a Ukrainian facility.”
Putin’s land and facility grabs may also force the United States, the European Union, and other nations to do something new: extend their regime of sanctions against Russian citizens and businesses to include Rosatom. Russia’s nuclear giant dominates the global uranium supply chain and is building more than a dozen nuclear power plants, including reactors in Turkey, Hungary, India, and Bangladesh.
Olga Kosharna, a nuclear-safety expert and former advisor to Ukraine’s nuclear regulator, said Rosatom’s international projects are a crucial pressure point to force Russia to demilitarize Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. As she put it during a public briefing last week, “only sanctions and only the collapse of Rosatom’s projects to build nuclear power plants abroad can somehow stop this madness.”
Ukrainian experts have argued that restarting fission reactions and power generation at Zaporizhzhia would once again inspire Russian forces to use it for blackmail and intimidation. That prediction was affirmed early Saturday when a missile strike knocked the entire plant off the grid, forcing it to rely yet again on diesel generators to cool its reactors and spent fuel for almost 48 hours.
Still, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy insists that both Ukraine and Europe need the huge plant’s 6-gigawatt generating capacity to stay warm this winter. Energoatom’s Kotin added further justification last week, telling the Associated Press that Zaporizhzhia needed to restart to keep safety-critical equipment from freezing.
Russian officials show no sign of concern about accusations of war crimes committed in Ukraine. However, they have shown sensitivity about accusations that Rosatom—one of the Kremlin’s corporate crown jewels—is directly involved in the war in Ukraine, according to Mykhailo Gonchar, president of the Kyiv-based Centre for Global Studies Strategy XXI. The Ukrainian national-security expert argues that Russia fears imposition of Western sanctions on Rosatom.
In a brief to IEEE Spectrum last week, Gonchar notes repeated denials in past months that Rosatom was involved in running the Zaporizhzhia power plant, such as a 19 August 2022 statement: “We categorically deny any involvement of Rosatom or any of its employees in the management or operations of the plant at any level.”
So far Western sanctions have broadly hit Russia’s economy, and they have ratcheted up eight times since February, as seen in this timeline of European sanctions since 2014. But they’ve spared Rosatom. “Rosatom has basically been exempt from the sanctions because Rosatom has cornered the market. They’re one of the few companies worldwide that controls the entire nuclear fuel cycle,” says Sonja Schmid, an associate professor in Virginia Tech’s department of science, technology, and society and author of a 2015 book on the Soviet nuclear-energy industry.
Gonchar, however, says Putin’s moves last week implicating Rosatom in Zaporizhzhia increase pressure on Western governments to override concerns from nuclear-energy-industry lobbyists.