ISBN: 978-1-911451-18-1

Pavel K Baev

PRIO

Read more about this book at www.libripublishing.co.uk

Russia’s war against Ukraine has delivered many shocks to global security. One of its unique features is the first ever capture of a major nuclear facility by hostile forces. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe, was stormed by Russian troops on 4 March 2022. The security risks generated by this forceful takeover remain acute and need constant monitoring, both technical and analytical. The slim and richly illustrated book by a British expert on risk management deserves praise for illuminating this problem but falls disappointingly short in the thoroughness of its research. Bennet’s examination of the origin of Russia’s aggression is both superficial and redundant, and his evaluation of risks related to the status of six nuclear reactors, five of which are in the ‘cold shutdown’ mode, is unduly abbreviated. He barely touches the matter of mismanagement of the plant by the Russian state-owned corporation Rosatom, which took ownership after the illegal annexation of the Zaporizhzhia region in September 2022. The role of Rosatom in enforcing the occupation begs the question about why this nuclear behemoth and its Director General Alexey Likhachev are not subjected to Western sanctions. The inconvenient answer is in the vulnerable nuclear supply chains that make the USA and many European states dependent upon Rosatom, which continues to build reactors in Turkey and Hungary. Investigation of these connections could have been more relevant for this book than a comparison of performance of poorly trained Russian conscripts with US soldiers in Vietnam (p. 42). Russian nuclear blackmail is a complex and fluid phenomenon, which needs to be countered precisely on its every direction, including the continuing occupation of Enerhodar.