Does Trump want Ukraine’s nuclear
power plants, what has Kyiv said?
The US president leading ceasefire negotiations between Ukraine and Russia has put a new offer on the table.
Kyiv, Ukraine – While urging Kyiv to give away its nuclear power plants to Washington, United States President Donald Trump may have forgotten one of the scariest words to ever come out of Ukraine.
Chernobyl, a synonym of the world’s worst nuclear disaster.
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The 1986 explosion at the nuclear power plant in then-Soviet Ukraine was hundreds of times mightier than the two atomic bombs Washington dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
The Chernobyl blast rocketed red-hot, highly irradiated graphite and dust, making parts of the cordoned-off “exclusion zone” around the shutdown plant unfit for human habitation for tens of thousands of years.
If it was not for thousands of servicemen and emergency workers who prevented a much bigger bang of Reactor Four, where uranium fuel rods melted into a giant “elephant foot”, most of Eastern Europe would have been similarly uninhabitable.
“For three months, I couldn’t get up, I could barely eat,” one of the workers, 69-year-old Volodymyr Robovyk, told Al Jazeera earlier this month, describing the health consequences he suffered.
What have the US and Ukraine said?
During a phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday, Trump said the best way for Kyiv to protect its four nuclear power plants is to give them away to the US.
“American ownership of those plants could be the best protection for that infrastructure,” Trump said.
Trump added that Washington could be “very helpful in running those plants with its electricity and utility expertise”.
Zelenskyy soon clarified that he and Trump “only talked about one power plant that is under Russian occupation”.
He meant the Zaporizhzhia plant in southeastern Ukraine, Europe’s largest nuclear facility that once generated a fifth of Ukraine’s electricity.
Russia occupied it in 2022, and all of its six reactors have been put into “cold shutdown” that stops energy generation and curbs the risk of an explosion.
However, Kyiv is not going to turn the Zaporizhzhia plant over to Washington.
“If they want to take it from the Russians, invest in it, modernise it, that’s another matter,” Zelenskyy told a news conference on Thursday while on a state visit to Norway. “We’re not talking about the change of ownership.”
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