“Monkeys with a grenade”: inside the nuclear-power station on Ukraine’s front line

By Wendell Steavenson

Boris loved his job working with technicians at the nuclear-power station in Zaporizhia. Born in 1968 in Poltava, a city in central Ukraine, he studied nuclear engineering at the university of Kharkiv before moving to Enerhodar, a city in the south of the country, built to house workers at the Zaporizhia power station. He joined the plant at an exciting time. “The field of nuclear energy stood for progress,” he said. “Something new.”

Before long he fell in love with a colleague named Ludmilla. The couple married and had two daughters. “I was happy…I studied new equipment, kept up-to-date with the developments of my profession. I was promoted up the career ladder. I had my beloved family, my work, my dacha. And then the war started.”

Zaporizhia nuclear-power station, Europe’s largest, fell into Russian hands in the first days of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. This April a drone reportedly exploded on the roof of one of the reactors. The Russians blamed the Ukrainians; the Ukrainians said it was a Russian “false-flag” operation. After the explosion, one of many such incidents over the past two years, Rafael Grossi, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said: “We are getting dangerously close to a nuclear accident.”