The City That Learned to Whisper

This article reconstructs daily life in Ukraine’s occupied territories from three interviews recorded by The Reckoning Project—a global team of journalists and lawyers documenting, publicizing, and helping build cases of atrocity crimes—with members of one family from Enerhodar, a city in northwestern Zaporizhzhia oblast. Viktor, Iryna, Andrii and Kateryna are pseudonyms. Some identifying details have been withheld for security reasons.

In Russian-occupied Enerhodar, the guns usually began at midnight. Russian artillery fired from positions around Enerhodar across the Dnipro River toward Ukrainian-held territory.

Viktor quickly learned to distinguish the outgoing shots from the explosions that followed. His family rarely slept before 2:00 a.m. Curfew began at 8:00 p.m., but most residents tried to finish their errands by 6:00 p.m. Anyone caught outside in the evening or at night risked being taken to “the basement,” the local term for improvised detention sites.

Viktor, a radiation-safety engineer at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), lived in Enerhodar with his wife, Iryna, a kindergarten art teacher, and their children, Andrii and Kateryna. The city was built around the plant, the largest nuclear power station in Europe.

Russian forces seized the plant in early March 2022, and soon controlled Enerhodar. Ordinary routines—work, a phone, a child’s education, serving a customer—became tests of loyalty. Surviving increasingly meant learning how not to be noticed by occupying forces. A new reality began to take shape.

Russia controls about one-fifth of Ukraine, with an estimated 3 million to 5 million people living in territories under Moscow’s rule. UN monitors say Russian occupation authorities have used threats, detention, torture, and prosecution to enforce discriminatory policies that effectively displace civilians living in the occupied territories. Simultaneously, the authorities confiscated displaced persons property and restricted their return, as well as pressured residents to comply with legal and administrative rules imposed by them (Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, March 20).

Working at Russian-Occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant

When Russian troops approached the Zaporizhzhia NPP in early March 2022, residents and plant workers tried to block them. Viktor and Iryna were among thousands who joined the protests. On March 3, 2022, Viktor recalled, Russian tanks fired at garbage trucks used as barricades, scattering the crowd. He and several dozen others withdrew toward unfinished apartment buildings, expecting the tanks to enter the city.

Instead, the tanks turned toward the nuclear plant. “For us, it was unthinkable that anyone would go and seize a nuclear power station,” Viktor said.

When he returned to work on March 9, 2022, half the windows in the plant’s training center had been blown out. Armored personnel carriers stood near the entrance and inside, their machine guns pointing toward workers passing through a checkpoint.

Employees were forbidden to use their phones. They were ordered to use designated routes, keep moving, and ignore what they saw. Viktor recalled being told, “Do not look anywhere, do not turn around, do not be distracted.”

Russian formations divided the NPP into sectors. When Viktor followed an old route through the NPP, a guard forced him to lie face down for about 40 minutes.

Russian forces mined the outer perimeter of the plant; wild animals from the nearby woods regularly triggered the mines. “Every day there were three or four explosions,” Viktor said. Eventually, workers stopped reacting.

Soon the workforce was divided into those willing to collaborate with Russian occupation authorities and those opposing the new order. Employees were pressured to sign contracts with the occupation-controlled operator. Viktor’s meeting with human resources took place in a company of men in civilian clothes and balaclavas. Some workers were offered promotions, others threatened.

Viktor said that the plant’s employees used to work as one large team. Now, “half are there and half are here, and you do not speak to each other at all … You are afraid even to say hello,” he said. “You might say something to [a coworker], and half an hour later they come for you.”

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) continues to describe nuclear safety at the Zaporizhzhia plant, which has not generated commercial electricity since September 2022, as precarious. In July, it reported repeated losses of external power needed for safety maintenance and disruption to the site’s regular water supply. The IAEA has assessed that the six reactors cannot be restarted while military conflict continues to endanger the facility (IAEA, June 12, 2025, July 15, 23).

The Knock at the Door

The same logic governed the city. A patrol could stop residents and search their phones. Viktor said messages to Ukrainian-held territory or evidence of a donation to the Ukrainian military could lead to detention.

Many residents kept two devices—a real phone hidden at home and a “clean” one for the street. Carrying no phone was dangerous because a patrol might decide the person had something to hide and escort them home for a search.

Public space shrank. Viktor said, “We went outside like this: jumped out, ran to the nearby market, bought food, and came home … That was it.”

To avoid confiscation, property had to look inhabited. Viktor said one acquaintance living outside the city had his car moved weekly; another woman slept in four different apartments so occupation authorities would see lights in the windows.

During Russia’s September 2022 annexation “referendum,” Viktor’s family bought food in advance and shut themselves inside. They turned off the lights and unplugged the refrigerator so the electricity meter would not reveal that anyone was home.

Viktor said two women carrying a ballot box moved through their nine-story building accompanied by three armed Chechen soldiers. “We sat at home and switched everything off—absolutely everything,” he recalled. “Only the cats peered out from behind the curtain.”

Russia staged similar votes in occupied parts of four Ukrainian regions and used the results to claim rightful annexation. The United Nations condemned the attempted annexations (United Nations, October 12, 2022).

Underground Kindergarten

Iryna’s kindergarten stopped accepting children after the invasion. In August 2022, occupation authorities took the keys and encouraged staff to work under Russian administration.

The teachers tried to appear politically insignificant. “We are small people,” Iryna recalled them saying. “We decide nothing.”

In October, the Ukrainian kindergarten reopened remotely. Iryna worked from home through closed Telegram groups, recording art lessons and posting materials for children in Ukrainian-held territory, abroad, and still under occupation. “It was underground work,” she said.

Kateryna, 16 when the occupation began, studied secretly in the Ukrainian education system. The family told outsiders she had stopped after ninth grade. “You had to hide constantly,” Iryna said, “you constantly had to lie.”

The UN Human Rights Office has documented how Russian authorities imposed the Russian state curriculum, restricted Ukrainian-language education, and pressured parents whose children continued studying online in the Ukrainian system, including by threatening to strip them of parental rights and remove their children (Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, March 21, 2025).

Pouring Beer for the Occupiers

Andrii worked as a barista at a local cafe and sometimes at another establishment that served beer. Russian soldiers and security personnel were regular customers. Among them, he recalled, were Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officers, servicemen from South Ossetia, and Kadyrovtsy—fighters loyal to Head of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov.

Russian authorities repeatedly asked which side he supported. “I am not interested in politics,” he told them. “I do not really care. The main thing is that everything should be fine.” The answer sounded harmless. It also allowed him to listen.

Russian servicemen spoke freely about their commanders, vehicles, and firing positions. Andrii, who was studying cybersecurity, was put in touch through his university with an officer of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), and began passing on what he saw and heard.

He also gained access to surveillance cameras in several cafes. To tell his SBU contact which recordings to check without leaving an obvious message, he sent photos of naked women with tiny time codes hidden in dark parts of the images. “You could see it only if you knew it was there,” he said. To outsiders, the conversation looked like an exchange of pornographic photos.

In the Basement

On June 6, 2023, the Russian-held Kakhovka Dam across the Dnipro was destroyed, flooding communities downstream and draining the reservoir on which much of southern Ukraine depended. According to Viktor, FSB officers came for the family the following day. Andrii recalled that two men entered the cafe where he had stopped on his day off.

“Are you Andrii?”

“Yes.”

“We are FSB. Come with us.”

They took him to the family apartment and searched it. The FSB detained Viktor, and Iryna was taken the following day. Kateryna was questioned but not imprisoned.

The FSB focused on Andrii’s cybersecurity education and Viktor’s background as a former reserve officer and his work at the nuclear plant. Viktor said interrogators showed him hundreds of enlarged photographs from the March 2022 demonstrations and demanded names. He estimated there were around 600 images.

Both Viktor and Iryna described being beaten and subjected to electric shocks during questioning. Iryna said interrogators hurt her while directing questions at her husband.

“I sat in an iron cage,” she recalled. “A real one, made of metal bars … They asked my husband the questions, but they beat me.” Andrii said that he was also subjected to torture, but he declined to describe what happened in detail.

Before releasing Andrii, the FSB demanded that he provide information for them. He agreed outwardly. When officers later asked what he had learned, he invented people and incidents, trying to appear cooperative. He knew the deception could not last. “Either I try to leave, or I stay here,” he recalled thinking. “If I stay, sooner or later they will imprison me or kill me.”

Iryna was released after a day, Andrii after three days, and Viktor after seven. When they returned home, electrical sockets, switches and panels had been torn from the walls. “There was complete devastation in the apartment,” Viktor recalled. The family never fully put it back in order. “We had already decided we would leave.”

The UN Human Rights Office found that Russian authorities subjected Ukrainian civilian detainees to torture and other ill-treatment “in a widespread and systematic manner.” Most of the 215 released civilian detainees interviewed by the UN since June 2023 described abuse in captivity, including severe beatings, electric shocks, threats, and prolonged stress positions (Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, September 23, 2025).

Forced to Leave

In October 2023, Iryna, Andrii, and Kateryna left Enerhodar together with a commercial driver. At Novoazovsk, Russian officials took their documents and called Andrii aside. Iryna said she immediately sensed that he would not be leaving with them.

She and Kateryna were allowed to continue after signing papers expressing support for Russia’s “special military operation.” Their cover story was that they were going to Moscow.

“My heart was breaking, because he is my child and my daughter is my child,” Iryna recalled. “I had to take my daughter to safety and leave him.” She could not show it. “Keep, as they say, a poker face. Everything is fine,” she told herself.

Andrii was stuck in the filtration facilities in Russia for about a month. Seven days in detention after what he described as a five-minute hearing on a fabricated charge, then roughly three weeks in a sports hall in a Taganrog hotel converted into a temporary center for Ukrainians.

Viktor remained in Enerhodar. His first attempt to leave failed because he did not have a Russian passport. After his release from detention, Viktor said a hospital refused to treat him without Russian documents. A neighbor who was a nurse treated him instead.

Viktor later obtained a Russian passport specifically to make departure possible and left on February 22, 2024. Two days later, he reached Kyiv.

UN monitors have documented how Russian citizenship and residency requirements became tied to healthcare, employment, pensions and other basic rights, increasing pressure on residents to integrate into the occupation system (Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, June 30, 2025; see EDM, January 22).

The family eventually reunited in Ukrainian-held territory. The shadow of occupation, however, followed them to Kyiv. Large groups of people frightened Viktor. For about two weeks, he said, he could not make himself speak normally.

“I spoke in a whisper, directly into people’s ears.”

https://jamestown.org/the-city-that-learned-to-whisper