The Ukrainian Parliament on Tuesday passed a contentious bill allowing the government to purchase two unused, Russian-made nuclear reactors from Bulgaria for at least $600 million — a project that has faced sharp criticism over its high cost and yearslong timeline.
The Ukrainian government plans to install the two reactors at the Khmelnytskyi nuclear power plant in western Ukraine, arguing they will help reinforce a grid crippled by relentless Russian attacks. Bulgaria bought them more than a decade ago from Russia’s state-owned nuclear giant, Rosatom, but they never went into operation.
Energy experts and anti-corruption activists say the reactors will take years to install and that the funds would be better spent on weapon procurement or on immediate solutions to strengthen Ukraine’s energy resilience, such as installing small gas turbines across the country.
There are also concerns that the project could serve as a front for money laundering, given the history of corruption cases tied to Ukraine’s energy ministry and Energoatom, the state-owned nuclear company overseeing the purchase. Several top officials and employees have been arrested in recent months and charged with taking bribes.
The purchase of the reactors has drawn significant attention in Kyiv’s diplomatic and political circles in recent months, as it touches on some of the most pressing challenges facing the war-torn nation today and in the near future: rebuilding its energy infrastructure, determining where best to allocate limited financial resources and combating entrenched corruption.
“It’s going to be a test,” Inna Sovsun, an opposition lawmaker who sits on Parliament’s energy committee, said in a phone interview. She was one of 39 lawmakers to vote against the purchase, while 261 voted in favor.
Ms. Sovsun noted that the Ukrainian Parliament still must pass a law approving the installation of the reactors before the project can move forward. She said she was concerned about how Kyiv’s foreign backers will perceive it, at a time when the election of President Trump has thrown U.S. support for Ukraine into doubt.
“With the multiple corruption schemes around Energoatom, I think that this decision might damage Ukraine’s reputation as the country that is trying to combat corruption and not feed it,” she said.
President Volodymyr Zelensky is expected to sign the bill into law soon. On Tuesday, he backed the project, saying it would prevent winter blackouts and lower electricity prices. He dismissed critics as people seeking to “fill their own pockets, or those of their patrons, with money from more expensive energy sources.”
With most of its thermal and hydroelectric power plants destroyed or badly damaged by Russian attacks, Ukraine relies on its three operational nuclear power stations to provide more than half of the country’s electricity.
Russia has refrained from attacking the nuclear plants directly, which could trigger a catastrophic disaster — although they have tried to cripple their ability to transmit power by destroying the substations connecting them to the grid. Russia captured Ukraine’s largest nuclear plant, the six-reactor Zaporizhzhia plant, at the beginning of the war, and it no longer supplies power to the grid.
German Galushchenko, Ukraine’s energy minister, has argued that expanding the country’s nuclear power capacity is the only viable solution to ensuring long-term energy security. He has emphasized that purchasing the two reactors from Bulgaria, instead of constructing new ones, is the fastest and most cost-effective option available.
Energoatom has also argued that Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, which date back to the Soviet era, rely on reactors built with Soviet technology that can only be sourced from former Soviet Union countries like Bulgaria. But the nuclear company also has plans to build two other reactors at the Khmelnytskyi plant using Western technologies.
More problematic, critics of the project say, is that it will take years to install the reactors, while Kyiv has little time to waste in strengthening its energy network. They argue that the funds would be better spent on repairing substations and thermal power plants damaged by strikes or developing conventional generating capacity.
It is also unclear how the government will fund the project after the European Union declined to help pay for the purchase. The government is strapped for cash and has already raised taxes. In addition, the deal with Bulgaria would supply only the plants and not the uranium to power them.
Placing more nuclear reactors in a war zone would also inherently increase risks. The war has already raised alarms about a potential nuclear disaster at the Zaporizhzhia plant, which is near the front line and has been struck repeatedly by artillery and small-arms fire.
