Global Courant
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky continues to warn of an impending nuclear tragedy. His military intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, recently said that is what the Russians did “drafted and approved” a plan to sabotage the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe.
Many local officials have joined in, and last week communities in central Ukraine rallied and held emergency drills to prepare for a disaster that officials said could spread a radioactive cloud across the entire area.
But here on the streets of Nikopol, the city across the Dnieper River from the Russian-occupied nuclear power plant, with its cooling towers poking through the afternoon haze, the attitude is a little different.
“I’m not worried,” says Nadia Zhylina, a retired factory worker. “Not at all.”
She drove a cart down a sunny boulevard, toenails painted, mascara on. All she radiated was calmness.
If there is a symbol of Ukrainian carelessness in the face of clear and present danger, it could be this city. Nikopol is within four miles of the beleaguered nuclear power plant, but if you arrive on Monday and go for a walk, you could be fooled into thinking everything was normal.
People waited at bus stops, lugged heavy plastic bags as they exited supermarkets, pushed strollers down sidewalks. Traffic went smoothly. Seagulls screeched in the sky. In the city’s main park, a group of teenagers did what kids all over the world do: they lounged on their backs in the tall summer grass and stared at their phones.
“I have a great life,” said Maksym Baklanov, one of them.
Nikopol is not only a hair’s breadth away from the nuclear power plant, it is also shelled almost daily by Russian troops across the river. But about half of the city’s pre-war population of 100,000 still lives here, and there has been no visible exodus, despite all the recent warnings of impending doom.
Besides determination and rebellion, there may be another explanation for this, shared by countless Ukrainians who confuse outsiders by living dangerously close to the front lines of Europe’s biggest war in generations.
Many people simply have no other options.
Of course they would move to a safer place, they say, if – and then they rattle off a long list of ifs – if they could find a new job, if they had the money to rent a second apartment, if they had a good car, if they had an obvious place to go.
“We are constantly talking about leaving,” says Yana Lahunova, Maksym’s mother. ‘I also have a boy. But where should we go? Who really needs us?”
She said everyone in town was talking about the nuclear power plant and the possibility that the Russians, who seized it last year, could do something. But that doesn’t translate into flight.
In some ways, it’s a miracle nothing happened.
Never before has one of the world’s largest nuclear facilities fallen on the bull’s eye of a full-scale war. Parts of two reactors have already been hit by artillery and a large-caliber bullet, although most engineers believe the plant is strong enough to withstand such attacks.
The Ukrainian engineers who prevent the factory from melting are reaching their own breaking point. They have been working at gunpoint for months, according to interviews with current and former employees. And Russian soldiers dragged scientists and technicians to a place called “the pit,” where they were interrogated and beaten, a former director said.
Now the Ukrainian army is on the march, trying to prove to itself and to the world that it can recapture territory that the much larger Russian army has taken. As the long-awaited counter-offensive begins to yield small gains, Ukrainian officials say Russian troops at the plant are becoming increasingly desperate.
Ukrainian officials say the Russians recently mined the cooling pond that keeps the reactors from melting down and have begun withdrawing some of their own experts, an ominous sign, they say.
“The situation is very dangerous” said Mr. Zelensky on Saturday. “We have received information from our intelligence service that Russia is planning to release radiation.”
Western experts have expressed less alarm. The conventional wisdom is that the Russians know that a nuclear incident could have frightening and unknown consequences and so it is unlikely – though not impossible – that the Russians would intentionally cause one.
The international inspectors who remain at the plant recently reported they had not seen any mines, but said they needed more access. Biden administration officials said that they did not believe that a threat was imminent, but that they were look very, very closely.”
Ukrainians try to take some comfort in that.
“I can’t go against the American reconnaissance,” said Yevhen Yevtushenko, Nikopol’s regional military administrator. “They must be right. I hope they are.’
Mr. Yevtushenko is an imposing figure with a long gray beard, a round cut and a gun on his hip. When asked why he did not order an evacuation of Nikopol if the country’s leaders really believe that a nuclear disaster is imminent, he said: “I wish people would leave, but we cannot force them. Ukraine is a free country and nothing has happened yet.”
As if Nikopol needed any more hardship, it ran out of water three weeks ago. When a large dam occupied by the Russians was suddenly destroyed, the reservoir on which Nikopol and many other communities relied fell dry. The city is now doing its best to provide residents with bottled water and water from other sources.
This leads to a point that Ukrainian officials are starting to make: If, as many Ukrainians believe, the Russians blew up the dam and caused widespread environmental problems, why would anyone doubt that they would sabotage a nuclear power plant?
Down at the dried up riverbed you can feel the great days of Nikopol. Old, sturdy houses, the white paint peeling off the bricks, overlook the river where sailboats raced in the summer and skated on the thick ice in the winter.
“We used to call this place the Green Sea,” says Alla Syrotenko, the deputy military administrator, who grew up here. “It was so beautiful.”
Now she’s worried it could become “a dead zone.”
Mrs. Syrotenko stood for a long time looking at the nuclear power plant in the distance. The sun shone on her and on the abundance of wildflowers in the gardens.
“I bet the Russians will do something,” she said. “I don’t know if it will be big or small, but they are trying to scare us.”
“But,” she added, “I’ll be the last to leave.”
Oleksandra Mykolyshyn and Evelina Riabenko contributed reporting from Nikopol.
