“What you say now will determine your fate”: Former workers at Ukraine’s besieged Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant say they were tortured and abused by Russian occupiers.
Carl Churchill/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
As Russian tanks were massing on Ukraine’s borders, hundreds of plant employees and their families were playing a twice-a-month scavenger hunt game named “Quest,” driving around in packed cars to find hidden messages in Enerhodar, residents said. The Soviet-designed city of gray apartment blocks was a tightknit community.
“You are part of the Russian Federation now,” Mr. Murashov recalled him saying. “From now on, you will work for Rosatom.” Enerhodar’s installed mayor, Andrei Shevchik, a Russia-born former plant worker, began pressuring the staff to join Russia’s May 9 victory celebrations. When few volunteered, out-of-towners arrived in packed buses, cheering as loudspeakers blared Soviet anthems before Russian news crews, residents said.
Mr. Shvets said that the Catcher visited him in the hospital. “You are a terrorist,” the Russian said, accusing the technician of involvement in the bomb attack that nearly killed the collaborationist mayor, which Mr. Shvets denied. His job was “basically to control a huge nuclear bomb that doesn’t explode but slowly smolders,” Mr. Dudar said. “They kept him for a couple of weeks, beat him. His wife was going crazy.”
By the end of June, the 6-by-12-foot holding cells below the commandeered police station were overflowing. Mr. Zhayvoronok’s was so full of people sleeping head to toe, the prisoners called it Tetris. Six of his 14 cellmates were plant workers. They told him to brace for interrogations and beatings by the FSB officers upstairs and gave him an instruction: When you hear a key turning in the cell door, face the wall with your hands up and legs apart.
Artillery fire around the Zaporizhzhia plant has repeatedly disconnected it from the electrical grid, imperiling safety measures.The holding cells under Enerhodar’s police station were just one part of a secret prison network scattered across the nuclear town. Some suspects were taken to the Hole, a cellar located at a former Ukrainian national guard base on the edge of town.
A weekly highlight was taking out the trash, the only time they were allowed fresh air. “You would sniff and it would make you high,” Mr. Zhayvoronok said. Another maintenance technician, who spent more than 70 days in prisons, described the Hole as a windowless underground room with a single guarded entrance. It was empty aside from wooden boxes and boards to sleep on and “smelled like feces and chlorine antiseptic,” he said.
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