Enerhodar

An IAEA team visiting Enerhodar on 1 July 2026 confirmed that a drone strike on 30 June had damaged the fire station supporting the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant's emergency response, significantly reducing its firefighting capacity. Director General Rafael Grossi said the loss of off-site power "again highlights the extreme fragility of nuclear safety at the plant and the need for maximum military restraint".

Enerhodar is a purpose-built Ukrainian city in Zaporizhzhia Oblast on the southern bank of the Kakhovka Reservoir, constructed in the 1970s to house workers at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), Europe's largest nuclear facility with six VVER-1000 reactors and a peak generation capacity of 5,700 MW. The city was designed entirely around the plant; its population of roughly 50,000 before the war consisted primarily of ZNPP employees and their families.

Russian forces captured Enerhodar and the ZNPP on 4 March 2022, in one of the early war's most consequential actions. The IAEA has maintained a permanent monitoring mission at the site since then. The plant has faced repeated external power supply failures: by early 2026, the ZNPP had lost external power on its 13th occasion and was operating on diesel backup with limited runway . Earlier, the IAEA brokered a localised Ceasefire specifically to restore a backup power line to the plant .

All six reactors have been in cold shutdown since 2023, with the plant providing only safety-critical loads. The combination of wartime power instability and restricted IAEA access creates conditions the agency has repeatedly described as among the most dangerous in the history of nuclear operations. A serious incident at the ZNPP would have radiological consequences across multiple European countries downwind.

The city's exposure sharpened further in mid-July: a drone killed ZNPP chief engineer Alexander Yakovlev and his driver in a vehicle strike at the plant's boundary with Enerhodar on 15 July, days after the town's fire station was hit again on 13 and 14 July, and Enerhodar itself lost power and water entirely in further strikes on 18 July, though the reactor site remained unaffected and radiation readings stayed normal. The IAEA separately reported that ZNPP had lost off-site power for the 22nd time since 2022 by mid-July, with ten of those twenty-two losses in the preceding three months.