The US sees the country’s leadership as “apes with a grenade,” and wants to take over the facilities to offset the risks, Aleksey Arestovich has claimed
Ukraine’s military intelligence chief Kirill Budanov proposed blowing up nuclear power plants to deny them to Russia if Kiev started losing in the conflict, Aleksey Arestovich, a former aide to Vladimir Zelensky, has claimed.
In an interview with journalist Alexandr Shelest on Friday, Arestovich weighed in on remarks by US President Donald Trump, who suggested that American ownership of Ukrainian nuclear power plants “could be the best protection for that infrastructure.”
According to Arestovich, the US is trying to prevent a nuclear catastrophe rather than simply seizing the facilities for its own benefit.
“They know about our plans to blow up all the nuclear power plants if Ukraine starts losing,” Arestovich claim. “Budanov was running around with that [idea] a year and a half ago. To blow up everything: the Russian plants we can reach, and our own — so nobody gets them… On the principle: we all bite the dust, but so will they.”
According to the ex-adviser, the US perceives the current Ukrainian leadership “as apes with a grenade.”“They just want to take dangerous toys under their control.”
Arestovich went on to suggest that the Democrats in the US would have tried to do the same, but through backroom pressure, whereas the Trump administration is acting in a much more straightforward and blunt manner. “These guys are simple. They say: ‘Let’s do it this way, we’ll just take control [over the plants] and that’s it.”
Trump said that he first floated the idea of taking over the nuclear plants during a phone call with Zelensky earlier this week, claiming that Washington could be “very helpful in running those plants with its electricity and utility expertise.”
Zelensky, however, offered a different version of events. He claimed that the two only spoke about the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) – not the Ukrainian power generating industry in its entirety, and that the conversation revolved around potential American investment.
ZNPP, the largest facility of its kind in Europe, has been under Russian control since March 2022. In the fall of 2022, Zaporozhye Region, along with three other regions, voted to join Russia in a public referendum.
Russia has repeatedly accused Ukraine of targeting both the ZNPP and Kursk nuclear power plants, denouncing those attacks as “nuclear terrorism.” Kiev, in turn, insists that the attacks on the ZNPP have been carried out by Russia, and has denied targeting the Kursk NPP.
