Russian weapons are stored just behind the wall from the reactor

Russian soldiers are constantly present at the plant — I see them every day. They sit in the crisis centers — these are rooms designed to protect the plant’s personnel, for example during a radiation release. Now these crisis centers are occupied by the military.

They live there, eat there, do their laundry. I think they’ve already moved their families in. They recently took over our cafeteria. There used to be two cafeterias for the staff — now there’s only one; they don’t let us into the other.

I come to work every day, and the fear is always there. He’s standing there with an assault rifle. And what do I have — a badge? Management asks us not to get into confrontations with the soldiers, not to talk back, to show them whatever they want to inspect: pockets, bags.

They search for partisans not just among the plant’s employees. A soldier can simply walk up to you on the street and demand to see your mobile phone. They immediately connect it to a computer and track deleted files.

Plant employees have been prohibited from carrying phones with cameras or internet access. I don’t take mine at all — not just to work, but even outside. I don’t have a Russian SIM card, and our network has been shut off here. So I only use my phone at home, on our home internet.

My family worries every time I leave for work. They get anxious if I’m late. Since I go without a phone, we can’t even call each other. My relatives keep asking when all this will end.

Salaries are still being paid, only bonuses have been cut. Though there are rumors that we’re about to switch to rubles. I can’t imagine how they plan to do that, because our salaries are paid by the state of Ukraine — they come to a Ukrainian bank card in hryvnias. Except there’s nowhere to withdraw them. So we cash out through middlemen, paying an extra fee.

Local racketeers drive to Zaporizhzhia, cash out there without a fee, then give us the money at a markup. Essentially, the city’s military administration, as they call themselves, provides cover for these racketeers.

There are employees who have gone over to the occupiers' side. You can hear it even in the conversations in the smoking area. This thing — “Russian news said…” — has appeared. We argue a lot among ourselves, of course.

It’s not cheerful here. Every day, lots of people leave. If someone leaves, I simply do their work. I don’t get paid extra for it.

If I leave, and all my colleagues leave, who’s going to operate this plant? Something irreparable could happen. When outsiders who aren’t familiar with this equipment start poking around, there’s no telling what could happen.

You can’t hide from a plant accident — not in Russia, not in Europe. The scale would be enormous. Right now they want to reconfigure our plant so that it supplies power to Kherson and Crimea. What might happen during reconfiguration, when they start doing it — I can’t imagine.

There are no spare parts deliveries — we can’t properly repair and maintain the equipment at the plant. What was in our stockpiles still remains. But those stockpiles aren’t enough for quality repairs.

Sooner or later the equipment will fail, and the unit won’t be able to function. We recently had Rosatom employees here, inspecting our equipment — supposedly familiarizing themselves. Our equipment has been in place since the 1980s. And they walked around, amazed that it was still working.

The situation at the plant is deeply alarming. Just consider that Russian military equipment is parked in the turbine hall. There are ammunition stockpiles, various rockets, explosives stored there. That’s extremely frightening, because the turbine hall is separated from the reactor by just one wall.

Any of those munitions could detonate. The reactor building can withstand a magnitude-7 earthquake, but we don’t know how powerful an explosion could be if the munitions go off.

Currently, two of the six power units are operating: the fifth and sixth. The first and second reactors were undergoing scheduled maintenance before the plant was seized. Every time a unit is restarted, an IAEA inspector comes — that’s the proper protocol. So after the maintenance, the reactors can’t be restarted because the military won’t allow the IAEA onto the plant. The third unit’s maintenance isn’t finished, and the fourth was shut down because it was recently shelled. A hit struck the dry storage facility for spent nuclear fuel, and the dosimeters that monitor radiation levels there are no longer working.

The plant has been shelled several times. At the very beginning, when they were moving into the plant, they damaged the training center. The nitrogen-oxygen station was literally shelled the other day — there was a small hydrogen release into the air. Then the pump station. These facilities aren’t on the plant itself, but in its immediate vicinity.

We primarily receive Russian media here, which regularly report that the plant is being shelled by Ukrainian forces. But people here aren’t stupid either — we can hear where the strikes are coming from, which side is doing the shelling. It’s not Ukraine. Right now all this propaganda is being poured out so that the local population stops leaning toward Ukraine.