Russians Hunt for Spies at Ukrainian Nuclear Power Plant

“He is still alive, but he won’t survive,” a Russian soldier using the code name “Catcher” said to his unit in a phone call intercepted by Ukrainian intelligence. “He resisted.”

Days earlier, an employee responsible for unloading fuel was taken away by soldiers for more than a week, returning shaken and refusing to speak, colleagues said. On many days, several employees are handcuffed and driven off for questioning, according to local officials, plant workers and their family members. Many have come back visibly injured after days of interrogation, these people said. More than a dozen have disappeared altogether, they said.

Mr. Shvets remains alive but in critical condition in a Russian-occupied hospital. “They were looking for him specifically,” said a close relative.

More than 500 Russian troops have been deployed to the sprawling Soviet-era complex that produced up to a fifth of Ukraine’s electricity before the war. Part of their mission is to weed out the Ukrainian partisans among its staff of 11,000. They patrol the plant with handguns and grenades dangling from their belts, reprimanding workers who speak in Ukrainian rather than Russian and screening their cellphones for evidence of allegiance to Kyiv.

In a guarded bunker beneath the plant, engineers from Rosatom, Russia’s state atomic energy corporation, have set up a base. They have demanded that Ukrainian technicians explain Zaporizhzhia’s newer computerized features, installed with European funds after the collapse of the Soviet empire.