Donald Trump has raised the possibility of the US taking control of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, as part of his push to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The president told his Ukrainian counterpart on Wednesday that US expertise could help manage the plants, with American ownership providing “the best protection” for the country’s energy infrastructure, according to a US readout.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy later clarified that their discussion focused solely on a facility currently under Russian control: the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest.
Three years after Russian troops seized the facility, raising fears of a Chernobyl-style disaster in Ukraine, Trump’s proposal has returned it to the spotlight as a potential pillar of a peace deal — one that also seeks to recoup the billions of dollars in US military aid.
How many nuclear plants does Ukraine have?
Ukraine has four nuclear power plants with 15 nuclear reactors in total, all of them VVER pressurised water units of Soviet design. Six of the reactors are at Zaporizhzhia and have been shut down since coming under Russian control.
The other nine reactors are at three plants under Ukrainian control: Rivne, Khmelnytskyi and Pivdennoukrainsk. They are operational.
“There’s no country in Europe, except France, that has so many units and such a developed nuclear industry in their country,” Petro Kotin, chief executive of Energoatom, Ukraine’s state nuclear power company, told the Financial Times last year.
Ukraine is also completing the construction of two new units at the Khmelnytskyi site, Kotin said, and planning to build at least eight more with the aim of bringing the country’s total to 24 gigawatts of installed capacity by 2050 — almost double its prewar level.
Is the US looking to own Ukraine’s atomic power?
It is unclear, but that is what an account of the Trump-Zelenskyy call from secretary of state Marco Rubio and national security adviser Mike Waltz said.
Zelenskyy, on the other hand, said the discussion only touched on Zaporizhzhia and US involvement would be about helping to “recover” the plant, followed by investment and modernisation.
“I said that liberating the plant alone is not enough because it needs infrastructure — water supply, technical personnel and many other steps to ensure that the plant starts generating money and electricity,” Zelenskyy told the FT after the call with Trump.
Speaking in Oslo on Thursday, Zelenskyy was more categorical: “All nuclear power plants belong to the Ukrainian people.”
If the Zaporizhzhia plant “doesn’t belong to Ukraine, it won’t work for anybody,” he vowed.
Why is the Zaporizhzhia plant so important?
Located in the front-line city of Enerhodar about 650km south-east of Kyiv, and along a land bridge that Russia controls, the Zaporizhzhia plant used to generate about 20 per cent of Ukraine’s prewar electricity.
“The occupation continues and this is a huge problem for us because we lost 6,000 megawatt of electrical capacity,” Energoatom’s Kotin said.
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Restoring supply from Zaporizhzhia will be crucial for Ukraine’s postwar recovery, when demand for cheap, dependable electricity is likely to soar. Ukraine could also have the potential to export power to Europe.
But whoever operates the plant would first need to re-establish a secure supply of water for cooling and storage of spent fuel. A 2023 explosion at a dam under Russian control drained the nearby Kakhovka basin, depriving the plant of the required water.
“The plant itself is in very degraded condition already and this degradation increases each coming day,” Kotin said.
The reactors are in what is called “cold shutdown”, meaning they are not generating electricity and are being cooled to keep them stable. This requires constant monitoring and maintenance. Russia allows occasional inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency but Kotin said their access was limited.
Two-thirds of the 11,000 specialised Energoatom staff that manned the plant before the invasion have also fled or no longer work at the site, Kotin said.
Does the Trump administration want more Ukrainian assets?
The Trump administration could seek to use the plant to help power the extraction of rare and critical minerals that Ukraine holds, according to two senior Ukrainian officials involved in drawing up an agreement with Washington on rare earths and other raw materials. That deal was meant to be signed earlier this month when Zelenskyy and Trump met in the White House, but the signing ceremony was called off when the two leaders clashed in the Oval Office.
The US president’s latest proposal for Ukraine to transfer control of its power plants mirrors that earlier minerals deal. Trump officials have suggested that US stakes in crucial assets in the country could serve as a form of protection. But Kyiv remains wary as this falls short of the security guarantees it is seeking from the US.
How else might the US be involved?
Westinghouse, the US nuclear energy giant, is already heavily involved in Ukraine’s nuclear power sector. It has developed nuclear fuel assemblies that can be used in Ukraine’s Soviet-designed reactors after Kyiv stopped buying Russian nuclear fuel in 2022, and is loading them into each unit.
The company is also creating a fuel production line in Ukraine and has started preliminary construction work for a new Westinghouse AP1000 reactor at Khmelnytskyi.
“Khmelnytskyi ideally would be the biggest nuclear power plant in Europe and in Ukraine — bigger even than the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant — and unit five and six will be on Westinghouse technology,” Energoatom’s Kotin said.
Cartography by Jana Tauschinski
