Dhe door opens. Dmytro Orlow comes out of his office, takes a step, then he sees us, stops, stares into space. “Mr. Mayor…” Now he realizes: someone wants something from him. “But we had…” His pupils are stuck in nothing. He is silent, walks around us and disappears around a corner.
Orlov is the mayor of the city of Enerhodar on the front in Ukraine. There, on a reservoir of the Dnipro, is the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. Before becoming mayor in 2020, he was a senior engineer there for thirteen years. When the Russians occupied his town and power plant at the beginning of March, he had to leave. “I only had two choices,” he says. It’s either I collaborate or I leave.” He brought his wife and children to the Ukrainian-controlled part and has been trying ever since to run Enerhodar’s business from this makeshift office in the regional capital, Zaporizhia.
In normal times, Zaporizhia is less than an hour’s drive from Enerhodar. The city is an industrial metropolis with almost 800,000 inhabitants on a huge Dnipro dam from Stalin’s times. Actually, Orlov wanted to give us an interview, but suddenly a bearded soldier wanted to speak to him. Something was urgent, and Orlov briefly ushered us out into the hall.
Suddenly there is a fire in the power plant
There have been repeated explosions on the site of his power plant in recent days. The Russians say: It was the Ukrainians, the Ukrainians say: It was the Russians. The people from the surrounding villages say: The Russians are shooting rockets at our cities from the power plant. For example, on Nikopol on the other side of the river, where the Ukrainian army is stationed. You can see it with the naked eye, they say.
The mayor just ran away. What to do? We pull out our phones, there are the first posts on Telegram: Something is wrong with the nuclear power plant. Something is burning. minutes pass. Employees walk across the hall. A woman, maybe a secretary, tells someone to prevent panic now.
In temporary exile: Mayor Dmytro Orlow has also left the nuclear city of Enerhodar in the direction of Zaporizhia.
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Image: Daniel Pilar
Stay or leave? Quickly into the car, across the dam and to the other bank, as long as the bridges aren’t blocked yet? That can happen very quickly. Ever since there were constant explosions in the power plant outside the city, the local stations only keep saying the same three words anyway: Chernobyl, Fukushima, Zaporizhia.
Now the secretary runs past again. What’s happening? No comment, rigid official face. Break. Then a little smile. “By the way, you can leave the iodine tablets in.” All clear. Another one of those eternal hits at the power plant, but nothing bad. Just a little grass that burned.
Then the mayor wants to speak after all. He gets two power plant engineers and one female engineer. They too fled from Enerhodar, their names are Aljona, Andryj and Olexyj. They don’t say their family names because they still have relatives over there in the occupied nuclear city. But they tell. And they know a lot because they keep in touch with colleagues who haven’t left yet.