An engineer at Europe’s biggest atomic power plant has been sentenced to 16 years in prison for ‘treason’

Just weeks into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, 51-year-old engineer Ruslan Lavryk witnessed the fully operational nuclear power plant where he worked being forcibly seized by Russian troops in a military operation.

The Russian capture of the facility was truly an unprecedented event: never before had a working nuclear power plant, let alone the largest one in Europe, been taken over by a foreign army.

By early March 2022, resistance from local Ukrainian defence forces had been crushed, and the Russian army set about establishing a field operations base among the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant’s concrete reactor buildings.

Many plant workers fled the facility and the nearby city of Enerhodar in the aftermath of the occupation, but some, including Lavryk, stayed behind at the request of the plant’s management, to ensure the six reactors at the facility could continue to operate safely, even if under Russian control.

That decision would ultimately cost him dearly, however. Alongside a dozen other former workers at the power plant, Lavryk would later be abducted by the FSB, subjected to torture, and sentenced to over a decade in a penal colony for treason.

Ten men from Rosatom

Administrators from Rosatom, Russia’s state-owned atomic energy agency, first arrived in Enerhodar in mid-March, around two weeks after the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant had been occupied by Russian troops.

Up to that point, the plant had been in a state of utter chaos. Russian soldiers had mined the area surrounding the plant seemingly at random, and periodically “raided” buildings that had already been seized.

Upon their arrival, the Rosatom administrators — mostly from Russia’s own Balakovo Nuclear Power Plant, on the Volga river — quickly placed the plant’s remaining staff under their command, replacing the Ukrainian management entirely.

These civilian specialists played a very significant role in this, including torturing our staff — if you disagreed, they, including Romanenko himself, would single you out.

“There were about 10 of them at first, and they were not engaged in maintenance as such,” an unnamed witness cited by a Truth Hounds report in 2025 said. Another explained: “They were monitoring the processes and actions of the Ukrainian personnel. … They were in direct contact with the general director, the chief engineer, and held several joint meetings.”

Around October 2022, the new Russian management, which was headed by Balakovo’s chief engineer Oleg Romanenko, began “terrorising” the plant’sUkrainian staff into signing new contracts with Rosatom, with those who refused facing severe reprisals.

“All this was happening on a massive scale,” another witness told Truth Hounds. “These civilian specialists played a very significant role in this, including torturing our staff — if you disagreed, they, including Romanenko himself, would single you out.”

All in all, Truth Hounds has recorded 78 incidents of the Ukrainian staff at Zaporizhzia being subjected to physical or psychological torture, including Andriy Honcharuk, a former diver at the plant, who died after being beaten by officers at a local police station.

The plant’s deputy press secretary, Andriy Tuz, who had kept the world updated on the battle for the facility right up until the Russian army captured it, was another victim of the Russian management’s brutality. Stopped by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) while attempting to flee to Georgia via Russia, Tuz had his fingers burnt with a lighter before being forced to record a video in which he retracted his previous claims that Russian troops had shelled the nuclear plant.

According to Vladimir Zhbankov, coordinator of the NGO Search Captivity, which provides assistance to Ukrainian prisoners of war and their families, at least 13 Zaporizhzhia staff members are currently in detention in Russia, including Ruslan Lavryk.

A village called Blessing

Despite pressure from Russian administrators, Ruslan Lavryk was one of the Ukrainian staff members who refused to sign a new contract with Rosatom. Instead he spent his time sabotaging Rosatom’s work at the plant, focusing on the technical equipment it had brought in to do live broadcasts for Russian state television.

After repeated attempts to get Lavryk to sign a new contract failed, in late 2022 he was overtly threatened by a group of 12 FSB agents. Fearing for his life, he told Rosatom he could no longer work at the plant, and left his home in Enerhodar to live in his small summer house some 16km away, in a village called Blahovishchenka.

It was impossible for Lavryk to avoid Enerhodar altogether, however, as Russian troops frequently requisitioned empty apartments in the city and even set cars on fire if they were left unattended for too long.

It was on one of these trips, about a year after quitting the power plant, that Lavryk was stopped at a military checkpoint and told he could no longer enter Enerhodar without a Russian passport. As a result he was obliged to acquire Russian citizenship in January 2024, a reluctant decision that would later allow investigators to charge him with treason.

Lavryk remained in Blahovishchenka, making infrequent trips to Enerhodar, until summer 2024. One day, a group of Russian paratroopers set up camp at a nearby grain elevator in the village, covering their equipment with camouflaged netting. Lavryk identified their position on a map on his phone, took a screenshot, and sent it to his son Vladyslav to pass on to Ukrainian troops holding the line in Marhanets, on the opposite bank of the Dnipro.

Though he had little money, from time to time Lavryk also donated to charities raising funds to buy drones and radio equipment for the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Though it’s unclear what ultimately attracted the FSB’s attention, eight armed men in balaclavas drove into Blahovishchenka on the morning of 7 June 2024, and immediately surrounded Lavryk’s dacha.

Later in court, the FSB would claim that Lavryk had immediately admitted his guilt to all accusations during his first interrogation.

Wearing no identifying symbols on their uniforms, the men broke down the front door and dragged Lavryk’s wife Inna out onto the street, before beating Lavryk and ransacking the house. Lavryk, along with all his computer equipment, mobile phones, documents, and the keys to his flat and car in Enerhodar, were then taken away.

Inna immediately went to the police in Enerhodar to report the abduction and plead for information, but she was told that the raid was a matter for the FSB, and that nobody knew where her husband had been taken.

As it turned out, Lavryk was being held nearby, in the basement of an FSB facility in Enerhodar. Having found evidence of both his AFU donations and his sharing of the paratroopers’ position on Lavryk’s phone, the FSB threatened him with summary execution. Terrified, Lavryk told them that he hadn’t known to whom his son would send the information, and that he had transferred money to the Ukrainian fundraisers by mistake.

Later in court, the FSB would claim that Lavryk had immediately admitted his guilt to all accusations during his first interrogation. Nonetheless, for whatever reason the FSB did not open a criminal case against him, and let him go home after a few days. Fleeing the region was impossible; all traffic in and out was checked at military blockades. There was nothing to do but wait. Two days later, they came for him again.

‘Riding the electric train’

Lavryk would spend the next six months in a string of detention centres, going through a process known as the “administrative carousel” — a term used to describe the practice of Russian law enforcement constantly issuing detainees with administrative offences, which allow them to hold someone without trial for as long as they like.

Lavryk would be repeatedly “released” from custody onto the streets of the occupied city of Melitopol, only to be immediately rearrested for violating curfew. The little we know about Lavryk’s lengthy detention comes mostly from short letters he managed to smuggle out of jail, which eventually made their way to relatives in Ukraine.

In those letters, he describes walking through literal puddles of blood, pooling out from rooms where detainees were being tortured. Lavryk himself was often beaten, and more than once recounted being subjected to electrocution.

That’s how the FSB works. Young women have hanged themselves by their bras, or just killed themselves. It’s all very brutal. They don’t consider us human beings, even while telling us that we are one people.

Judging by the symptoms he describes, at some point while in detention Lavryk suffered a severe concussion. Often, particularly after being made to take medication, he would experience headaches that were so painful that he wondered whether the Russians were performing medical experiments on their prisoners.

“In all the time I’ve been in here, the sheer number of people I’ve seen… it’s awful,” he wrote in one letter. “It’s hard to watch when an 84-year-old woman is taunted by these bastards, and made to ‘ride the electric train’ — that is, electrocuted. Or when a 74-year-old man is strung up with his hands tied behind his back and tormented, or beaten so hard he goes flying across the room.”

“That’s how the FSB works. Young women have hanged themselves by their bras, or just killed themselves. It’s all very brutal. They don’t consider us human beings, even while telling us that we are one people.”

According to Lavryk, most of the acts of torture were carried out by FSB agents, or by those he calls “turncoat Ukrainians” who act as cruelly as possible in an attempt to earn favour.

“They came to us every day, bringing us some papers or other to sign,” Lavryk’s cellmate Vitaliy Kolotylo, who was released and deported via Georgia to Ukraine in December 2024, would later recall.

“Who knows what was written on those papers — but if you didn’t sign them, they’d put a bag over your head and beat you. Sign here, or the beatings continue.”

Laundry letters

Until January 2025, Lavryk was held under a series of “administrative arrests”. He did not have a permanent lawyer, and was routinely denied both family visits and official correspondence. In effect, he was kidnapped and kept in total isolation from the outside world. Despite all this, he managed to establish a surprisingly effective system for smuggling letters out of jail, even though it worked in one direction only.

These letters contained not only a record of the conditions of his imprisonment, regular acts of torture, and his own state of mind, but also lists of imprisoned Ukrainians that Lavryk met while detained. In total, Lavryk identified 40 prisoners this way; so far relatives have been found for 13 of them, who are now coordinating efforts to get their loved ones released.

Lavryk took any opportunity to get his messages out. Most commonly he asked cellmates who were being detained only briefly to smuggle the letters out with them when they were released, handing them the contact details of his family members. Sometimes even guards at the jail would agree to pass the messages on, albeit for a fee.

But Lavryk struck upon his most ingenious method when he was given the opportunity to pass dirty laundry to his relatives — the detention centre had no laundry facilities of its own — during trips to court or investigative hearings.

‘They threatened to go after you as well, if I didn’t sign the confession,’ he wrote to his wife.

He sewed notes into the seams of his clothes, where they could be retrieved by his family later: “No one rummaged around in the dirty laundry.”

Tired of the constant cycle of administrative cases against him, Lavryk’s family hired a lawyer to represent him in early 2025, though staff at the detention centre in Melitopol turned the lawyer away. The visit did not go unnoticed, however: within half an hour, a criminal case for treason was drawn up against Lavryk.

Lavryk was accused of two crimes: sending the location of Russian paratroopers in Blahovishchenka to the Ukrainian army, and donating money to the Ukrainian army to buy drones.

“They threatened to go after you as well, if I didn’t sign the confession,” he wrote to his wife. “They beat me and electrocuted me. They hit me hard on the head and arms with the back of an axe, and put a bucket or a pot over my head.”

Aside from Lavryk’s mobile phone and the confessions beaten out of him, no other evidence was collected by investigators. In September 2025, the treason case was transferred to a court in Melitopol.

Committing treason

For the last six months, Lavryk has been held at a detention centre in Simferopol, in occupied Crimea, where he was assigned to yet another public defender — Alexander Chibrikov — who advised him to sign a confession, write a letter of repentance addressed to both the FSB and Russian Defence Minister Andrey Belousov and donate at least 10,000 rubles (€100) to support the “special military operation”.

Chibrikov represented Lavryk until he was found guilty by the Zaporizhzhia Regional Court, connected by videolink to the Supreme Court of Crimea, in its verdict in October 2025. “I beg you to get me out of here,” Lavryk wrote to his family after the verdict. “I’m so tired; I just want to go back home, back to all of you.”

“I’ve been in here with Russian soldiers who broke their contracts. One of them told me: ‘I’d rather do the time, and let the idiots go and fight.’ And with priests, too. I’ve heard so many things, it’s horrifying what’s going on. They’re all totally insane, totally brainwashed, probably irredeemably so. One Russian priest told me that the government has turned Russia into a concentration camp.”

Lavryk was ultimately found guilty of treason and sentenced to 16 years in a maximum-security facility; the sentence was upheld at appeal. He is currently still being held in a pretrial detention facility in Simferopol, awaiting transfer to a penal colony later this month.

‘I really want to go back to Ukraine, I don’t want to go anywhere else,’ Lavryk wrote in his most recent letter to his family in mid-February. ‘I really, really want to leave here and go home.’

Throughout his drawn-out detention, Lavryk’s health has been in decline. He suffers from frequent migraines and tinnitus, which he attributes to the beatings he received at the hands of the FSB. He also has problems with his teeth, a few of which have been knocked out.

The only real chance Lavryk now has of regaining his freedom is through a prisoner exchange between Russia and Ukraine, but civilian convicts are rarely included in the lists Ukraine prepares for exchange.

The Ukrainian Association of Relatives of Political Prisoners of the Kremlin (ORPK) and investigative group Truth Hounds have launched a campaign to support former employees at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant who are currently in Russian detention. According to Ihor Kotelyants, head of the ORPK, at least 35 people with some connection to the plant are imprisoned by Russia, including current and former employees and their relatives.

To draw attention to their plight, activists and human rights activists have started a petition which they intend to deliver to Rafael Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency. So far the petition has been signed by nearly 53,000 people.

“I really want to go back to Ukraine, I don’t want to go anywhere else,” Lavryk wrote in his most recent letter to his family in mid-February. “I really, really want to leave here and go home.”