U.S. control over Ukrainian nuclear power plants?
G ilbert Doctorow March 20, 2025
Today’s news on the Ukrainian front centers on the one-hour telephone conversation between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky yesterday during which Trump suggested that the USA take ownership of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants. The BBC’s commentators could make no sense of this. Let’s give it a try below.
Most of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants are within territory under its own control. However, the largest such plant, indeed the largest nuclear plant in all of Europe, is in Zaporozhye under Russian command. Because of repeated Ukrainian missile and drone attacks which damaged the generators providing electricity needed to control the plant and also damaged administrative facilities, the Zaporozhye plant is not operating presently, but it could be restored in relatively short order.
Now why would the USA be interested in taking control of those plants?
For one thing, these are tangible assets of considerable present and future value. In that sense, they are easy to claim as partial reimbursement for the cash and war materiel that Washington poured into Ukraine over the past three years, much easier to quantify than the much touted rare earth deposits that were first identified as potential compensation to the USA but are likely a chimera.
Secondly, US ownership would, like the imagined rare earths mining, provide a focus for long terms American presence in Ukraine and thereby would be a ‘guarantee’ against possible future Russian ‘aggression’ without the need for boots on the ground. This would knock down entirely the British-French initiative for a coalition of the willing to position so-called military peace enforcers, which the Russians categorically reject and which could be a trigger for the start of WWIII.
Thirdly, US ownership would prevent the more insane groups within Ukrainian civil and military elites from using the nuclear waste buried just around the power plants to create ‘dirty bombs’ to attack Russia, as the revanchists surely have been plotting.
What surprises me about this proposal is that it found an author within the Trump entourage and was quickly taken up to the level of The Boss. There were plenty of smart assed Yale and Harvard educated lawyers in the entourage of Joe Biden but all they cooked up for their boss was sophomoric level ideas that lacked any grasp of how the real-world functions. Not so the people around Trump. Bravo!
How would the Russians take this idea of U.S. ownership of Kiev’s nuclear power plants? I think it will go down very well in Moscow. This kind of adult analysis of the situation and preparation of constructive tentative solutions has not been seen on the U.S. side for decades.
If I may here complete the thinking process that I opened yesterday in my chat with Judge Napolitano, I think the essence of the reset Trump is proposing to Putin is for a new Russian-American alliance, as per in WWII, set within a reconfigured understanding of who are the Allies and who are the Axis. The Axis today is Britain, France and Germany! If I am right, then it is essential that progress be made on the Ukraine settlement post haste so that Trump can join Putin, Xi and Modi in Moscow on 9 May.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025
Gilbert Doctorow |
