Ruslan Lavrik, an engineer at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, has been sentenced by a Russian court to 16 years in a strict-regime penal colony on treason charges. According to Novaya Gazeta Europe, after the plant was seized he refused to sign a contract with Rosatom, was arrested in the summer of 2024, and later endured beatings, torture, and repeated transfers between detention facilities.
Russian forces took Enerhodar and the plant in early March 2022. Greenpeace and Truth Hounds described it as the first seizure of a nuclear power station during military hostilities in history. After Rosatom personnel arrived, part of the staff was, according to investigators and the newspaper’s sources, pressured into cooperation, while those who refused were barred from work, abducted, and subjected to coercion.
According to Lavrik’s family and his own letters, he refused to work for the Russian state corporation, left Enerhodar, and hid in Blahovishchenka. In June 2024 he was detained by FSB officers. Investigators claimed he had passed information about Russian military positions to the Ukrainian side and had transferred money for the needs of the Ukrainian army.
His relatives say that after the detention he was kept through what is known as an “administrative carousel”: at night he was repeatedly re-arrested for allegedly violating curfew, allowing the authorities to keep him locked up for months. He was held in the basement of the FSB office in Enerhodar and later in detention facilities in Melitopol, Akimovka, Vesele, Pryazovske, Mariupol, Donetsk, and Simferopol.
“I am asking very much to get me out of here, I am very tired and I want to go home to you very badly,” Lavrik wrote to his family.
The appeal upheld the sentence. Lavrik is now being held in Detention Center No. 2 in Crimea and is awaiting transfer. His family says he suffers from frequent migraines, ringing in his head, and dental problems, with some teeth knocked out. Rights advocates are campaigning for the release of ZNPP workers and say that a prisoner exchange is almost his only chance of regaining freedom.