Rosatom Chief Warns Repeated Strikes on Enerhodar and ZNPP Threaten Disaster

Key facts

Speaking to domestic media, Rosatom chief Alexey Likhachev asserted that the security environment around the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant has degraded into a routine cycle of artillery and unmanned aerial vehicle strikes. According to reporting by TASS, Likhachev stated that Ukrainian artillery and drone operators are deliberately aiming at civil administration buildings, municipal infrastructure, and residential neighborhoods within Enerhodar, rather than engaging fortified military targets.

Likhachev contended that these persistent bombardments represent a calculated strategy to destabilize civic life in the municipality, where the majority of the station's operational staff and auxiliary workers reside with their families. By eroding local living conditions, disrupting power and water utilities, and exposing the civilian workforce to physical danger, the Rosatom director argued that the operational margin of safety for the nuclear facility itself is steadily degrading. Likhachev warned that if this pattern of cross-river bombardment continues unchecked, the cumulative damage to support networks could trigger a severe industrial or radiological disaster that would inevitably expand beyond the plant's boundaries to affect the broader Black Sea basin and Eastern Europe.

The public warning follows a series of local reports over recent months detailing drone detonations against auxiliary electrical substations, municipal administrative quarters, and water pumping stations in Enerhodar. Russian management at the facility has repeatedly claimed that Ukrainian forces are attempting to disrupt the delicate cooling arrangements required to keep the plant's idled nuclear fuel stabilized.

Why it matters

The security situation at the Zaporizhzhia plant represents one of the most acute industrial hazards produced by modern mechanized warfare. Although all six reactors are in a shutdown state, meaning that active fission has ceased, the hundreds of metric tons of irradiated uranium fuel residing within the reactor vessels and auxiliary spent fuel storage pools continue to generate residual decay heat. This decay heat must be continually dissipated by circulating coolant water. If external electrical power is lost and backup diesel generators fail, or if critical cooling water infrastructure is severed by explosive ordnance, the cooling cycle could break down, potentially initiating fuel cladding failure, hydrogen generation, and an uncontained release of radioactive materials into the atmosphere.

Beyond the immediate physical structure of the station, the psychological and physical well-being of the workforce is integral to maintaining safety protocols. Operating a six-reactor nuclear complex requires thousands of specialized engineers, technicians, health physicists, and maintenance crews. If Enerhodar's municipal services collapse and personnel are forced to evacuate or work under the acute terror of artillery strikes, the complex could suffer from chronic staffing deficits. Errors in routine maintenance, electrical switching operations, or water management can have compounding consequences in an environment where safety systems are already operating with redundant safety buffers stripped down to minimum thresholds.

Furthermore, any significant radiological incident would have profound cross-border geopolitical and humanitarian repercussions. Depending on seasonal atmospheric conditions, prevailing winds could disperse radioactive isotopes across large swathes of Ukrainian agricultural land, southern Russia, Moldova, Romania, and other European countries. Such an event would contaminate major water systems, disrupt global grain export corridors along the Black Sea, and trigger an unprecedented diplomatic crisis concerning international maritime and environmental liability.

Russian military forces seized control of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in early March 2022, following intense clashes in the administrative and training districts of the site. Since that period, the facility has functioned in an anomalous state: owned sovereignly by Ukraine under international law, but occupied by Russian troops and administered by a subsidiary entity established by Rosatom. Enerhodar, a planned city built in 1970 alongside the construction of the neighboring thermal and nuclear power complexes, saw a substantial portion of its pre-war population of roughly 50,000 residents flee across the front lines, leaving the station dependent on remaining local workers and technical personnel dispatched from Russian civilian nuclear facilities.

Throughout late 2022 and 2023, the plant repeatedly came under direct fire, suffering multiple breaches of administrative structures, damage to transmission yards, and impacts near fuel containment buildings. Each side consistently attributed the strikes to the other. In response to the escalating peril, the International Atomic Energy Agency established a persistent technical presence at the site in September 2022, known as the IAEA Support and Assistance Mission to Zaporizhzhia (ISAMZ). IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi has led multiple delegations across the frontline to inspect physical damage and press both combatants to commit to demilitarization principles.

In May 2023, Grossi presented five fundamental safety principles to the United Nations Security Council: prohibiting attacks of any kind from or against the plant; forbidding the storage of heavy weaponry or military personnel on site that could be used for attack; ensuring external power supplies remain unthreatened; protecting all structures, systems, and components essential to safety; and preventing any actions that undermine these principles. Despite these diplomatic interventions, the plant has suffered at least eight instances of complete disconnection from the national electrical grid since the outbreak of hostilities, forcing operators to rely on emergency diesel generators to run cooling pumps.

Operational risks escalated further following the catastrophic destruction of the downstream Kakhovka Dam on the Dnipro River in June 2023. The collapse drained the sprawling Kakhovka Reservoir, which had historically supplied the plant's massive cooling pond. Since that disaster, technical staff have been forced to rely on a network of specially drilled groundwater wells, spraying ponds, and auxiliary discharge canals to secure the circulating water necessary to prevent the fuel from overheating.

Reaction

While Likhachev's comments represent the Russian nuclear sector's official stance, Ukrainian authorities have routinely rejected Moscow's assertions regarding strikes on Enerhodar and the station. Kyiv's national nuclear operator, Energoatom, along with the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has consistently accused Russian forces of stationing heavy military equipment, armored vehicles, and munitions inside the plant's turbine halls. Ukrainian officials maintain that Russian troops use the nuclear complex as an artillery shield, firing rockets and mortars across the Dnipro River at Ukrainian-held cities like Nikopol and Marhanets in the expectation that Ukrainian artillery cannot return fire without risking the reactors.

Western governments and the European Union have echoed Ukrainian demands for Russia to fully withdraw its military units and civilian personnel from the site, calling for the immediate return of the facility to full Ukrainian sovereign control under IAEA supervision. The United States and its allies have emphasized that the root cause of every safety risk at the installation is Russia's continued military presence.

At the International Atomic Energy Agency headquarters in Vienna, Director General Rafael Grossi has repeatedly cautioned that the safety status of the installation remains extraordinarily fragile. While the IAEA's published monitoring bulletins maintain strict diplomatic neutrality and rarely assign definitive blame for individual drone or artillery strikes lacking forensic certainty, the agency has consistently warned that localized strikes in the direct vicinity of Enerhodar and the plant increase the likelihood of critical equipment failure.

What we don't know yet

Significant gaps remain concerning the operational reality on the ground in Enerhodar. Because independent international journalists are barred from the Russian-controlled administrative zone and IAEA monitors operate under constrained transit mandates arranged by Russian security services, external observers cannot independently verify the frequency, origin, or precise targets of the strikes described by Likhachev. Ukrainian military commands do not publicly acknowledge specific drone or artillery operations within Enerhodar, leaving claims of infrastructure damage largely uncorroborated by neutral third parties.

Moreover, the long-term integrity of the station's internal cooling infrastructure remains uncertain. While Rosatom has reported that newly constructed groundwater wells are maintaining adequate water levels in the cooling ponds, independent hydrologists have questioned whether these subterranean aquifers can sustain water volumes indefinitely without the hydrostatic pressure once provided by the full Kakhovka Reservoir. It also remains unclear precisely how many qualified Ukrainian personnel remain employed at the station, what percentage of the workforce has signed contracts with Rosatom's operating company, and whether staffing numbers satisfy baseline statutory safety standards for maintaining six idle reactors.

What to watch

The immediate development to monitor is the stability of the plant's remaining high-voltage electrical grid connections. The station relies entirely on a single operational 750-kilovolt main power line and a single 330-kilovolt backup line to maintain its connection to the Ukrainian energy network. Any physical severance of these lines would plunge the site into its ninth complete station blackout, activating the emergency diesel generation systems that carry a finite fuel supply.

Diplomatically, observers are tracking upcoming sessions of the IAEA Board of Governors and the United Nations General Assembly in Vienna and New York, where international delegates will assess compliance with the five safety principles. Any formal report submitted by Rafael Grossi following rotation cycles of the ISAMZ monitoring team will provide crucial independent data on structural damage, auxiliary system integrity, and radiation monitoring readings in the perimeter zones.

Finally, the status of the reactor cores themselves requires continued observation. While all six units are currently preserved in cold shutdown, Russian authorities have periodically signaled an intention to restart one or more reactors once military conditions stabilize. Any attempt to bring a VVER-1000 unit back to operational criticality would exponentially increase the heat load, operating pressures, and potential radiological risks, fundamentally transforming the safety calculus along the Dnipro front.

This account is based on reporting published by Russian state news agency TASS.