Volodymyr Zelenskyy ruled out ceding control of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, but left open the possibility of the US investing in them following a phone call with President Trump.
Speaking to reporters in Oslo on Thursday, the Ukrainian leader said he hadn’t discussed the ownership of the nation’s 15 nuclear power units with the US president and said their control amounted to a “guarantee of security” for his war-torn country.
The controversy centers around Ukraine’s largest nuclear power plant in the southern region of Zaporizhzhia, which Russia has occupied since early in the full-scale invasion and Zelenskyy has said came up in his call with Trump on Wednesday.
The US president offered to help run Ukraine’s electricity supply and nuclear power facilities, according to a statement on the call from Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz. It also added that “American ownership of those plants would be the best protection for that infrastructure.”
Zelenskyy said disposing of the station would be illegal as it’s state-owned. However, if the Americans “want to take it away from the Russians, if they want to invest and modernize it — this is a different question,” the president said. “It is open, we can talk about it.”
The Ukrainian leader said Wednesday that he’d agreed to a proposal for a halt to mutual strikes on energy assets as an initial step in Trump’s effort to end the war that began with Russia’s full-scale invasion three years ago.
The site surrounding the Zaporizhzhia plant, which was originally designed to generate about a fifth of Ukraine’s power, has been subject to frequent aerial attack since the war began, prompting warnings about the probability of a catastrophic nuclear accident. The Russian engineers in control of the facility have shut down all six reactors as a safety precaution.
Zelenskyy said the power plant was in difficult conditions and needs cooling. That became more difficult after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam, which Ukraine blames on Russia, reduced water supply.
“President Trump asked me: ‘what you think about this station?’” Zelenskyy told reporters in the Norwegian capital. “I said: if it’s not Ukrainian, it will not work for anyone.”
