World must lean on Putin to avert nuclear disaster

It’s not every day the International Atomic Energy Agency dispatches monitors looking like Hollywood action heroes on a mission to save civilization. But that’s an apt description of the IAEA team now inspecting the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. It’s Europe’s largest nuclear reactor complex and sits right on the front line between the Ukrainian defenders and Russian invaders. The IAEA’s goal is to avert a radiation disaster.
The Russians seized ZNPP in March and have held it since. The same Ukrainian engineers — or those who haven’t escaped yet — still run the complex, but now they’re hostages and working under duress. Although the IAEA monitors will talk to them, it’s unclear whether the Ukrainians will be able to speak frankly in the presence of their captors.
The monitors’ objective is of course to keep the reactor complex safe — that is, to prevent a radiation leak or meltdown reminiscent of the disaster at Chernobyl in 1986. But they will also try to determine which side has been responsible for near-constant shelling at the plant in recent weeks. So far, suspicion falls mainly on the Russians, who have a history of using disinformation, including false-flag operations, in Ukraine and elsewhere.
The larger goal of the IAEA must now be to persuade both Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, that Zaporizhzhia must be bracketed out of the fighting. A radiation cloud, should it be released, could waft anywhere — to populations living in European NATO countries, Turkey and the Caucasus, even Russia itself. It would in effect mark the failure of efforts to contain Putin’s war of aggression and could therefore draw in other combatants. Like the use of chemical or nuclear weapons, it would mark a qualitative escalation, raising fears of World War III.
Zelenskiy’s incentives are to keep ZNPP safe. It’s Ukrainians who’d be the first victims of a radiation leak. And Kyiv needs to maintain the support — moral as well as military and economic — of the West and the wider world. Putin’s mind is harder to read. He has pointedly disregarded Western leaders — from French President Emmanuel Macron to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz — who’ve tried to talk reason to him.
But there are some interlocutors he can’t afford to snub.
One is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a leader of a NATO member who has nonetheless positioned himself as mediator lately. Putin and Erdogan have clashing interests in the region, but they talk the same language of hard realism. Erdogan should explain to Putin that the Russians would be blamed for a nuclear disaster and must cooperate in preventing it.
Chinese President Xi Jinping is in an even stronger position to influence Putin. China and Russia, which will this week conduct joint maneuvers in the Sea of Japan, are nominal allies, but economically Beijing calls the shots. Xi has an interest in preventing the Ukraine war from escalating, and in showing that China can solve international problems as well as cause them.
Putin will never agree to unilaterally withdraw his troops from Zaporizhzhia and yield the plant to the Ukrainians, which would amount to retreat. So the goal of negotiations must be the creation of a demilitarized zone in and around the nuclear complex, monitored by IAEA inspectors and guarded by United Nations peacekeeping troops.
Such a solution will be extremely difficult to achieve. But if it comes about, it would set new precedents for limiting war even in future conflicts. Anything less could be disastrous.
—Bloomberg