Rosatom says drones hit two Zaporizhzhia plant buildings and killed a food driver

Alexei Likhachev, director general of Rosatom, said on Monday that Ukrainian drones had hit two facilities at the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant overnight and that a driver delivering food for plant staff had been killed. He said there was no threat to nuclear safety. Ukraine has not commented.

Likhachev named the targets as a laboratory building and a radioactive-waste processing plant. He did not say how many drones were used, whether any were shot down, or how far the damage ran inside either building. The death he reported is of a civilian driver on a food run, not of a reactor operator. That detail places the strike, on the Russian account, outside the reactor halls and inside the support buildings that sit on the same site.

The plant is Europe's largest, with six reactors. Russian forces took it in the first weeks of the war that began in February 2022. It produces no electricity. It still needs power from two external lines to keep nuclear fuel cool. On Saturday the plant's management said Ukrainian shelling over recent weeks had damaged external power equipment, and that electricity was coming from emergency diesel generators. A plant on diesel is a plant one fuel delivery away from a cooling problem. Monday's drone claim did not say whether the generators, the fuel store, or the external lines were hit.

Moscow and Kyiv have accused each other for three years of military action that puts the site at risk. The International Atomic Energy Agency has kept a presence there and has repeatedly described loss of off-site power as the standing danger, rather than a direct hit on a reactor vessel. Likhachev's statement fits that pattern in one way and breaks it in another. He says nuclear safety was not threatened. He also says a waste-processing plant and a laboratory were struck, which are nuclear facilities even if they are not reactors.

The same day, a separate drone hit an apartment building in the city of Zaporizhzhia, injured three people on the ninth floor, and started a fire. That city strike is not the plant strike. The plant lies on the south bank of the Dnipro, in Russian-held ground. The city centre is on the other side of the fighting. Treating them as one event would invent a single operation that neither side has described.

A driver killed on a food delivery is a specific casualty. Plant staff still have to eat while the reactors sit in cold shutdown. If the Russian account holds, the supply line into the site is now part of the target set, alongside the laboratory and the waste plant. If it does not hold, Kyiv has a public denial available and has not used it. Silence is not a confirmation. It does leave Likhachev's version as the only detailed account on the record on Monday night.

The cooling question is the one that outlasts the claim about the laboratory. Saturday's notice said the external lines were already damaged and the diesels were carrying the load. A waste plant and a laboratory can be hit without touching a reactor. They cannot be hit, on a site running on diesel, without raising the chance that the next strike, or the next fuel truck that does not arrive, is the one that matters. Likhachev said that point had not been reached. He also said a man bringing food was dead.