The Soviet planners who founded Enerhodar in 1970 bestowed the city with a fitting name: “the gift of energy.” For decades, the southern Ukrainian city was an affluent company town for power plant workers and their young families, with tree-lined avenues and tall apartment blocks.
But as the Russian occupation enters its fourth year, the hub that provided electricity across Ukraine is a ghost town ruled by violence and fear. Russian troops conduct surprise home searches and seemingly arbitrary detentions, while some residents disappear into indefinite incarceration in distant penal colonies.
The majority of its original inhabitants have fled and their homes are being repossessed. Russians are settling in, Reuters found. Ukrainian children are indoctrinated to be loyal to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian state energy giant Rosatom.
Money from Moscow and Rosatom is pouring in. The energy company and Russian law enforcement control nearly every facet of life. Soldiers are ensconced in the nuclear power plant in the Zaporizhzhia region.
Across the city, the changes are evident. Schools and cultural centers have reopened after modest renovations paid for by Rosatom, supermarkets with Russian names sell Russian produce, and locals see unfamiliar Russian faces walking otherwise empty streets.
Reuters interviews with more than 50 people, including current and former residents and officials, as well as dozens of pages of documents published by the occupation authorities and Rosatom, reveal how Enerhodar is becoming a thoroughly Russian atomic city. It is an essential element in the broader plan to Russify Ukraine and replace a potentially disloyal population with one that identifies only with Moscow.
“Russians, they force people to love them,” said Oleg Dudar, a manager at the nuclear plant until he fled in August 2022. “That is, they say: Either I will shoot you, or break your arm, leg or do something else if you don’t love me.”
The Kremlin didn’t respond to requests for comment from Reuters. The Enerhodar occupation administration and Rosatom said they are focused on building a brighter future for the city and denied that residents have been violently subjugated.
“The goal is to ensure high quality of life to attract and retain specialists,” the administration said.
Ukraine’s government and Energoatom, its nuclear energy company, did not respond to requests for comment about the allegations of Russian abuse, but have in the past accused Russia of coercing and torturing plant staff.
Energoatom was created in 1996 and remains the plant’s legal operator but has not controlled operations since Enerhodar fell to Russian forces within weeks of the full-scale invasion in February 2022. The Russian takeover of the nuclear plant drew international attention as the world feared another disaster like Chornobyl.
Putin’s forces have since seized nearly all of the Zaporizhzhia region, which he claims is an integral part of Russia. In a signal of the importance of Enerhodar’s nuclear plant to the Russian occupation, his top envoys rejected a suggestion made earlier this year by President Donald Trump that the plant could be managed by the United States. The American delegation didn’t raise the issue publicly when the two leaders met this month in Alaska.
All six reactors at the plant, which is Europe’s largest, have been in a cold shutdown since 2024.
While the majority of residents have left Enerhodar, some nuclear plant workers have been prevented from doing so, former inhabitants told Reuters. Darya Dolzikova, a senior research fellow specialized in the nuclear industry at the Royal United Services Institute think tank, said she believed Russia placed such importance on capturing the town because they and their families made up so much of the population.
“Each nuclear power plant is different, so Russia will have been extremely reliant on the Ukrainian workers living in Enerhodar to run the plant,” she said.
RE-EDUCATION
Nowhere is Russian control more evident than in Enerhodar’s children. Across Ukraine’s occupied territories, Russia has imposed a curriculum centered on patriotism and loyalty.
For Volodymyr Sukhanov, a soft-spoken chess tutor who taught in Enerhodar for 30 years, the curriculum recalls his Soviet childhood. Sukhanov moved to Enerhodar decades ago, as hundreds relocated to the new city in search of work and a family-friendly lifestyle. Unlike his peers, Sukhanov was escaping repression.
Back then, Sukhanov taught chess in summer camps near Moscow. He was in his early 30s and the Soviet Union was in its waning days. Idealistic, Sukhanov joined former pupils at pro-democracy demonstrations.
In 1991, at a protest against a coup attempt in Moscow by communist hardliners, soldiers gunned down a favorite student named Ilya Krichevsky. The young officer in charge was detained but the case against him was dropped, Russian media have reported. Sukhanov never forgot the officer’s name: Sergei Surovikin.
Devastated, Sukhanov decided to start afresh in Enerhodar. He settled into a small apartment and resumed teaching chess.
Decades passed. In 2022, Surovikin, then commanding Russia’s invading military, again upended Sukhanov’s life.
“I couldn’t believe it,” said Sukhanov, now 67. He fled in August 2022, carrying a bag of clothes and a foldable plastic chess set.
