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The Military Power

Russia Accused of Severing Ukrainian Nuclear Power Plant's Link, as Energy Remains a 'Key Battleground' (usnews.com) 69

Posted by EditorDavid from the power-plays dept.
It's the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. But "Ukraine's foreign minister accused Russia on Sunday of deliberately severing the external power line to the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station," reports Reuters, "in order to link the plant to Moscow's power grid." Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Moscow was attempting to test a reconnection to Russia's grid. Ukraine has long feared that Moscow would try to redirect the plant's output to its grid. But Russian officials have denied any intention of trying to restart the plant, seized by Moscow's forces in the early weeks of the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

The plant produces no electricity at the moment, but has been without an external electricity source for nearly three weeks. Officials have relied on emergency diesel generators to secure the power needed to keep the fuel cool inside the facility and guard against a meltdown. "Russia intentionally broke the plant's connection with the Ukrainian grid in order to forcefully test reconnection with the Russian grid," Sybiha wrote on X in English. He denounced the "attempted theft of a peaceful Ukrainian nuclear facility".... Each side has accused the other of shelling that caused the line outage.
Russia's continued occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant deprived Ukraine of a quarter of its generating capacity, according to a report from the Brookings Institute — calling Ukraine's energy sector "a key battleground" in the war. The Russian invasion began on the very day that Ukraine launched its so-called island test. This involved completely isolating the Ukrainian and Moldovan power systems from their neighbors to check whether the system was stable. This is a mandatory procedure prior to synchronization with the European grid... Despite this, Ukraine managed not only to militarily defend itself but also to maintain grid stability in wartime conditions and implement all the solutions necessary for an unprecedented synchronization on March 16, 2022.
In 2022 a former commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (from 1998 to 2007) even argued in the Wall Street Journal that "An unappreciated motive for Russia's invasion of Ukraine is that Kyiv was positioning itself to break from its longtime Russian nuclear suppliers..." At the time of the invasion, Westinghouse supplied fuel to six of the 15 [Ukrainian] nuclear reactors and could displace the Russians in all of them. The U.S. government had been highly supportive of this effort, and these fuel contracts represented hundreds of millions of dollars in yearly lost sales to Atomstroyexport [a nuclear exporter that's a subsidiary of Russian state corporation Rosatom]. By seizing the nuclear plants, Russia is able to retake the market for Ukrainian nuclear fuel.

Most important, Westinghouse, with support from the U.S., was in a position to build nuclear reactors in Ukraine over the next two decades. On Aug. 31, 2021, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and her Ukrainian counterpart, Herman Halushchenko, signed a strategic cooperation agreement to build five nuclear units with a value, according to the World Nuclear Association, of more than $30 billion. The timing is telling. In November 2021, Ukraine's leaders signed a deal with Westinghouse to start construction on what they hoped would be at least five nuclear units — the first tranche of a program that could more than double the number of plants in the country, with a potential total value approaching $100 billion. Ukraine clearly intended that Russia receive none of that business.
Brookings looks at how Ukraine's energy sector has fared during the war: The Ukrainian energy sector was designed to be oversized with significant redundancy in order to meet huge Soviet-era industrial demand as well as to make it more resilient to a future world war... A radical change did not occur until 2014, when Ukrainians overthrew the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych. In the decade since then, Ukraine has pursued a policy of European Union (EU) integration with determination and without interruption... The real prospect of an improvement in the quality of life and development of Ukraine through integration with the EU and NATO was unacceptable to Russia, which first annexed Crimea and covertly attacked the Ukrainian Donbas, before launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Russia's in-depth knowledge of the Ukrainian power system, dating back to the Soviet Union, was used to carry out a well-planned operation to cut off electricity to Ukrainians.

The aim was to break the morale of Ukrainians to continue defending themselves and to collapse the economy so that it could not support the Ukrainian military effort. Ironically, however, the size of the energy system, which had been scaled up in case of war, and the enormous Western support, unexpectedly ensured its resilience to Russian attacks.
Although they note that "During the first two years of the war, Russia fired nearly 2,000 missiles and drones at Ukrainian energy infrastructure... "

And this week in Ukraine, damage to substations, power plants and oil depot temporarily cut off electricity for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian homes and businesses, reports the UN. "As colder weather sets in, strikes on critical infrastructure are deepening humanitarian needs," warned a UN spokesperson on Thursday...
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Russia Accused of Severing Ukrainian Nuclear Power Plant's Link, as Energy Remains a 'Key Battleground' More

Russia Accused of Severing Ukrainian Nuclear Power Plant's Link, as Energy Remains a 'Key Battleground'

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  • Spoils of war? (Score:5, Informative)

    by SirSpanksALot ( 7630868 ) on Sunday October 12, 2025 @09:09PM (#65720706)
    I'm not sure why anyone would be surprised... Russia currently controls it, and isn't going to give it up without a fight... Since its an asset they've taken control of they'll definitely try to leverage it for their own benefit. If Ukraine doesn't want it to be used by russia, they'll need to blow it up (risking a meltdown), or blow up the external grid connections to prevent its use.

    • Since its an asset they've taken control of they'll definitely try to leverage it for their own benefit.

      How? The NPP is not operational and not likely to recover, remember when the ruzzkie terrorists blew up the Khakovka dam, which was providing water for the plant and left it without cooling?

      The only reason this is done is to untie the hands of the terrorist putin state to bomb Ukraine's power infrastructure.

      Russia currently controls it, and isn't going to give it up without a fight

      Kind of like the USSR didn't give up Eastern Europe without a fight?

      • >Kind of like the USSR didn't give up Eastern Europe without a fight?
        But the USSR did give up Eastern Europe without a fight. First was the Sinatra Doctrine for the Warsaw Pact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] Then Mikhail Gorbachev dissolved the Soviet Union and most states all declared independence soon after: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] Gorbachev gave the West everything beyond it's wildest dreams. Yet the West never embraced Russia, continued to treat them as an enemy and sought to further
        • The USA gave Russia tons of support and money. What more did you want? (serious question).

          continued to treat them as an enemy and sought to further diminish them so they'd be even less of a threat.

          After Zhirinovsky won the Duma election, based on the platform of re-establishing the Russian empire, it proved that Russia still wanted to be a threat, at least a large section of the population.

          • He never won a presidential election but , holy shit:

            A 1995 BBC documentary showed Zhirinovsky telling the crowd at a campaign rally: "Help us, and you'll never have to vote again! I'm not saying, 'Vote for us and maybe in 20 years' time somebody will do something.' No, these will be the last elections! The last ones!

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by DarkOx ( 621550 )

            Wow that's kool-aide drinking there. Let's be real Zhirinovsky project looked a lot more like creating an eastern EU, than a return to the USSR.

            Basically at a time when the a long oppressed Russian public needed lesson in how Democracy and freedom work, include how that sometimes mean change isnt as rapid as many would wish, the US Administration and a lot of Western Europe showed them "Elections only matter if we like the outcome!" That pretty much opened the door for Putin's rise.

            Both the Neo-liberal, an

            • Zhirinovsky pretty clearly wanted to control Eastern Europe. He wanted to control Russia, as well.

              The entire school of foreign policy from Kissinger - Hillary Clinton as sec-State need to be told to just STFU.

              The Ukraine war is one parting present from the old snake Kissinger. If he can't play ball, no one can.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by cusco ( 717999 )

            What they wanted, and they were fairly open about it, was to Balkanize the country into smaller easily-controlled fiefdoms in order to better loot its industrial and natural resources. They set up the banking system specifically to aid and promote the "privatization" of the state controlled industries into the hands of their hand-picked soon-to-be oligarchs, IIRC Richard Armitrage was deeply involved in that whole process, which should tell you a bit about its goals.

        • Re:Spoils of war? (Score:5, Informative)

          by Mr. Dollar Ton ( 5495648 ) on Monday October 13, 2025 @12:15AM (#65720852)

          But the USSR did give up Eastern Europe without a fight.

          Yes, smartypants, they did, because the KPSS(CPSU) brought the country to its death bed.

          And then the USSR died, because it wasn't a viable structure, economically, politically or militarily. It starved itself to its death, in short, and no one but the Soviet leadership is responsible for this.

          Does this make you sad? Go complain to Vova, to Yosif, to Nikita, to Lyonya, Yura, Kostya and Misha about it, not to us. They are the people who created an empire that could not even maintain itself, not "the West".

          Gorbachev gave the West everything beyond it's wildest dreams.

          Misha didn't "give" anyone anything except that great last present he made to the russians - the only thing that would save the former Soviet Union from a bloody and destructive civil war - the freedom of choice to remain or depart to all its former member states.

          Note, this was a choice guaranteed by the very Soviet constitution.

          Compare this to putin, who by his stupidity and lack of vision has lead your country into a situation where that bloody civil war that will destroy you is inevitable and a matter of time. Quite possibly it will be the first civil war that will employ tactical nukes.

          Yet the West never embraced Russia

          Why would anyone embrace that festering shithole? All the states that left the former Soviet union and reformed were embraced. Maybe the ruzzkie should have followed suit instead of sliding into a failed state under Yeltzin and his "family" and then a full dictatorship under putin and the "Lake" cooperative? Maybe your failures are a fault of your own, and not that of the West, eh?

          continued to treat them as an enemy and sought to further diminish them

          It would be nice to see some evidence of this bullshit. To the contrary of your claims, the West was largely supportive of the ruzzkie pederation of putin, it supported your mother and father through the crisis created by your corrupt government, it traded with you, invested in your economy and until 2013 even ignored all border conflicts that you started and all war crimes you committed there - Transnistria, Abkhazia, North Osetia, the Ikcheriya wars, the invasion of Georgia.

          This only made you, terrorist scum, bolder and crazier.

          In short, geopolitics as usual.

          In short, you're full of shit.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by linuxguy ( 98493 )

          > Gorbachev gave the West everything beyond it's wildest dreams. Yet the West never embraced Russia, continued to treat them as an enemy and sought to further diminish them so they'd be even less of a threat.

          Most of the west lined up to buy energy from Russia and was giving it billions of dollars each and every year. Russia became very wealthy in this process. Russia had savings of about $600 billion before they re-invaded Ukraine in 2022. Most of that came from the West.

          Some people in the West still tho

    • Definitely don't want to attack the plant since it sounds like one of the reactors is still in a hot shutdown and several other reactors are still fueled. By all means bomb the shit out of any power lines and substations that Russia attempts to build to connect to the power plant.

    • War is hell.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      First of all, spoils of war doesn't work the way you think it does under international law, according to multiple treaties to which Russia is a signatory. Spoils of war are limited to military equipment like tanks or ships. You can't invade your neighbor and declare anything you can grab as yours because they're spoils. Private property, civilian infrastructure, cultural objects and human beings are explicitly excluded.

      So when Russia seized the power plant, what it got -- again according to treaties it

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