After months of worry over the possibility of nuclear accidents at the Zaporizhzhia power plant in Ukraine, the reactors were stopped in 2022 and the plant mainly dropped off as a topic of discussion. Until last weekend.
That was when President Trump suddenly said he intended to bring up Ukrainian power plants in his call on Tuesday with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to discuss cease-fire proposals. While he did not specifically identify the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which has been under Russian control since early in the war, his administration has strongly hinted at it.
Why did the plant re-emerge as a topic of discussion?
According to a current Ukrainian official and a former one, both of whom have knowledge of talks between the United States and Ukraine, the plant may now be on the table because it is partly tied to negotiations over U.S. access to Ukrainian mineral resources.
The critical minerals deal that Mr. Trump wants is contingent on extracting and processing those minerals. And that takes a lot of energy, which the six-reactor Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, Europe’s largest, could provide.
The phone call between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin did not yield a broad cease-fire, although Russia said it would halt strikes on energy infrastructure if Ukraine would do the same. It was not initially clear if the fate of the Zaporizhzhia plant was discussed Tuesday, but neither the Kremlin nor the White House mentioned any such discussions after the phone call.
Kyiv and Washington have been negotiating for weeks over U.S. access to Ukraine’s untapped deposits of critical minerals, including lithium and titanium, which are crucial for manufacturing modern technologies.
Ukraine has told the United States that processing the minerals would be viable only if the Zaporizhzhia plant was back under its control, according to the two Ukrainians, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the talks between Ukraine and the Trump administration. The currently serving Ukrainian official said the issue came up again last week during a top-level U.S.-Ukraine meeting in Saudi Arabia to discuss a potential cease-fire.
The plant in question sits in Ukraine’s southern region of Zaporizhzhia, which Russia has said it annexed despite controlling only part of the territory.
Worries over the safety of the plant continue in part because of its proximity to frontline fighting. And although all six reactors have been shut down — meaning they no longer generate electricity — they still require energy to power critical safety systems and cooling mechanisms to prevent a meltdown.
Ukraine has repeatedly demanded that Russian forces leave the plant in order to reduce the risk of a nuclear accident.
For Ukraine, regaining control of the plant has obvious benefits. Andrian Prokip, an energy expert with the Kennan Institute in Washington, said Ukraine desperately needs the plant to ease power shortages caused by Russian attacks on electrical facilities. The plant served nearly a quarter of Ukraine’s electricity needs in 2021 before the war began, Mr. Prokip said.
The argument that the Zaporizhzhia facility would be needed to extract and process minerals emerged recently, as Ukraine and the United States negotiated the minerals deal.
That agreement would establish a jointly owned fund collecting revenues from new resource extraction projects covering oil, gas and minerals. Mr. Trump has presented it as a moneymaker, and one that will generate funds to pay the United States back for the billions it has spent aiding Ukraine during the war. The nuclear power plant is near several Ukrainian-controlled deposits of titanium, iron and rare earths.
The deal had been set to be signed at a White House meeting between Mr. Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky last month. But the signing was delayed after the meeting devolved into a tense showdown. When Ukraine and the United States announced that Kyiv had agreed to back a monthlong cease-fire proposal last week, their joint statement said they would conclude the minerals deal “as soon as possible.”
Energy experts also noted that the United States could have an economic interest in seeing the plant back under Ukrainian control because it uses fuel and technology supplied by Westinghouse, an American nuclear technology company.
Victoria Voytsitska, a former Ukrainian lawmaker and senior member of the Parliament’s energy committee, said fuel supplies to the plant “were a big contract” for Westinghouse. Over the past three years of war, Westinghouse has expanded its presence in Ukraine, gradually replacing technology from the Russian nuclear giant Rosatom used in Ukrainian plants.
It remains unclear what Mr. Trump could offer to Russia to get it to hand over the plant to Ukraine. Russia would likely demand something in return, Mr. Prokip said, such as the lifting of Western sanctions that have hurt its economy. “They will not just give this nuclear power plant back for free,” he said.
