Ukrainian leader says the plant has been without power for seven days, the longest stretch since Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion.
Published On 30 Sep 2025
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned that the situation at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is “critical” as the facility has been without power for seven days.
“It has been seven days now. There has never been anything like this before,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly address on Tuesday.
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One of the diesel generators providing emergency power to the plant is no longer working, Zelenskyy said, a week after external power lines went down.
“Russian shelling has cut the plant off from the electricity network,” the Ukrainian leader said.
“This is a threat to everyone. No terrorist in the world has ever dared to do with a nuclear power plant what Russia is doing now.”
The outage is the longest the Russian-occupied plant has gone without power since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
It is also the 10th time since the start of the war that the plant – the largest in Europe – has been disconnected from the power grid.
Russia seized control of Zaporizhzhia in the first weeks of the war, and the plant’s six reactors, which before the conflict produced about one-fifth of Ukraine’s electricity, were shut down after Moscow took over.
But the plant needs power to maintain cooling and safety systems, which prevent reactors from melting – a danger that could set off a nuclear incident.
Russian officials have not commented on the latest statements on conditions at the plant.
But Moscow and Kyiv have repeatedly accused each other of risking a potentially devastating nuclear disaster by attacking the site, and have traded blame over the latest bla