As a demand, it is Donald Trump at his most confusing. The American president appears, at least according to Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, to have told Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday that “American ownership” of Ukraine’s four nuclear power plants would be their best protection in future – although the Ukrainian president said on Thursday that “the issue of property, we did not discuss”.
Of the four, the most significant, and the one that Trump has repeatedly referred to in the past week, is the vast, six-reactor Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. It is Europe’s biggest nuclear generator, located on the southern bank of the Dnipro River. Before the full-scale Russian invasion it produced about 20% of the country’s electricity but it is now on the frontline of Europe’s largest war since 1945.
Such is the nuclear power station’s importance that it was seized by Russia within the first month of fighting and has remained on the frontline ever since. Electricity generation was halted in September 2022 – it is simply too dangerous and too many prewar employees had fled. All six reactors have been in cold shutdown (running below boiling point) since April last year.
But, though it is dormant, it is not dead – though until Trump showed interest in it, it appeared that the reactor could be a diplomatic sticking point between Russia and Ukraine without any American involvement. Russia’s goal has been to reconnect the Zaporizhzhia plant to the Russian electricity grid, but restarting it is impossible during wartime because of all the work required.
The destruction of the Nova Kakhova dam in June 2023 has gradually led to the loss of available water, necessary if the reactor were to be restarted. “There is not enough water in the cooling pond. The only way it can be refilled is to build a new pumping station,” says Shaun Burnie, a nuclear expert with Greenpeace. “But that is only possible after the end of hostilities.”
That may have left the site, towering over the river, visible from the Ukrainian-held Nikopol, unusable for the moment. But if Trump really does want it for the US, he has to contend with the fact that the nuclear plant appears also to be a trophy for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, never mind its interest to Ukrainians keen to recover it in peacetime and rebuild their economy.
In an interview with the New York Times, Rafael Grossi, the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, last May recounted a meeting he had with Putin in autumn 2022 where they discussed the plant. Grossi was impressed by Putin’s knowledge of the site, knowing the number of reactors and where its backup power supplies were situated. “He knew every detail,” Grossi said. “It was sort of remarkable.”
Experts in Ukraine speculate that Trump’s interest in Zaporizhzhia is because Kyiv has told the US it would be a source of cheap local energy that could be used to power the mining and processing plants as part of the rare earths and minerals extraction deal it hopes to sign with the White House. But it would also boost the position of a Pennsylvania-based company in the country.
Both before and during the war Ukraine has been switching its reactor technology and fuel supplier from Russia’s Rosatom to Westinghouse, a US-based supplier controlled by a Canadian private equity company. Zaporizhzhia also used Westinghouse fuel, a key plank in the company’s effort to break into the market for Soviet-designed reactors. But this obvious US interest is unlikely to appeal to Putin.
If the frontlines in Ukraine were to be frozen as part of an armistice or peace deal, it would be even more difficult to see how Zaporizhzhia could be effectively operated by the US on one side of the Dnipro while surrounded by Russian occupiers, when Ukraine is not thought willing to renounce its ownership.
And while Rubio said American ownership would be the “best protection” for Ukraine’s nuclear and energy infrastructure, the US has so far said it is not willing to provide any post-conflict military or security guarantees for Ukraine either.
