Ukrainian authorities say the condition of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in southern Ukraine has deteriorated significantly in the year since Russian forces occupied it, and Moscow’s aim may be to make it unusable by the time it is eventually returned to Ukraine.
Russian soldiers have recently set up machine guns on the grounds of the plant, placed military equipment in engine rooms, covered windows with sandbags and even carried out indoor welding work that has set off fire alarms, Ukraine’s state nuclear company, Energoatom, said on Tuesday in a post on the Telegram social messaging app.
Those actions come on top of damage from shelling last summer, including to an area where spent nuclear fuel is stored; disruptions to the plant’s management in power struggles with Russian occupiers; and the shutdown of the complex’s six reactors.
“There is a feeling that one of the occupiers’ goals is to leave the Z.N.P.P. in an inoperable condition after its liberation,” Ukraine’s energy minister, Herman Halushchenko, said on Ukrainian television last week.
The instability at the plant, which is the largest in Europe, violates a cardinal rule of nuclear safety. The International Atomic Energy Agency last week warned that the plant’s situation was “precarious.” U.N. inspectors last month warned of continued blasts audible from the plant in an apparent reference to shelling along the war’s nearby frontline.
At the same time, Moscow, which illegally annexed Zaporizhzhia region last October, has placed the plant under the control of its own state nuclear company, Rosatom, and has engaged in a protracted struggle with Ukrainian engineers and officials over the management of the plant. Ukrainian authorities say that some workers have been interrogated and at least one has been killed.
Last month, the authorities also said that Moscow had stationed hundreds of troops in a bunker at the plant before they were deployed in eastern Ukraine.
While the plant’s six reactors no longer produce power for Ukraine’s grid, the complex still requires power for safety and maintenance reasons. The I.A.E.A. said last week that the plant’s only remaining 330 kilovolt backup power line had been disconnected for a third time in less than a week, likely because of shelling on the other side of the Dnipro River.
Moscow’s control of the plant gives it significant leverage over Ukraine’s energy production and months of talks held by the I.A.E.A. with the warring governments to establish a security zone around the plant are yet to bear fruit.
Mr. Halushchenko said that those talks had reached a dead end because Moscow refused to accept its demands that the plant should be demilitarized and Rosatom should withdraw.
