KYIV, Ukraine — President Donald Trump’s transactional approach to bringing peace to Ukraine has found a new craving: the largest nuclear power plant in Europe.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Trump discussed the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant during a call Wednesday. Trump offered to help solve the ongoing dispute over Russians illegally controlling the plant, Zelenskyy said.
“President Trump asked me [about the plant], I told him that if it is not Ukrainian, it will not work for anyone. This is illegal. [But] if the Americans are thinking about how to find a way out and want to take it away from the Russians and modernize it — this is a different issue, an open issue. We can talk about it,” Zelenskyy said at a press conference Thursday in Oslo, Norway.
While such a gambit would be complicated, not least because the invading Russian military currently occupies the site, the leadership in Kyiv is mulling the idea as Ukraine searches for a lasting security guarantee from the U.S. Initially that backstop looked set to take the form of a minerals deal giving America lucrative preferential access to Ukraine’s critical raw materials.
