Enerhodar
A city of power workers beside the largest nuclear plant in Europe.
Enerhodar was founded on 12 June 1970 on the left bank of the Dnipro in connection with the construction of the Zaporizhzhia Thermal Power Plant; the settlement received its name in 1972 and town status in 1985. Construction of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, the largest in Europe, began, according to the ESU, in 1981, according to Suspilne, in 1980; the sixth power unit was launched in 1995. Residents remember the 1979 “Suchasnyk” Palace of Culture with a bust of Shevchenko opposite, the embankment and Victory Park. From 28 February 2022 thousands of Enerhodar residents, unarmed and carrying flags, stood at the checkpoint at the entrance to the town. On the night of 4 March russian troops entered the town and seized the ZNPP; the training centre was on fire, and three Ukrainian servicemen were killed. According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, this was the first armed seizure of a civilian nuclear facility of such a scale; the occupiers illegally detain and torture the plant's workers. The population has shrunk from 53 thousand to 10–15 thousand (Suspilne, 2025).
Temporarily occupied since 2022, together with the Zaporizhzhia NPP.
Chronicle
- 28 February – 2 March 2022 — For several days in a row, thousands of residents, unarmed and carrying national flags, went out to the checkpoint at the entrance to the town to stop russian columns from passing.
- 4 March 2022 — Shelling of the ZNPP grounds — for the first time in history, troops shelled an operating nuclear power plant — and a fire in the training building; the plant was seized.
- From 2022 — The plant is occupied by russian troops: its workers are illegally detained, pressured and tortured; in four years the ZNPP has lost external power 10 times, and all six reactors are in cold shutdown (2026).