ZAPORIZHZHIA / MELITOPOL, November 3 — The management at Ukraine's Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant said on Tuesday that a Ukrainian drone had killed two people in a car, including a female employee of the station, Reuters reported. The claim was made by the plant's Russian-installed management; Ukraine did not comment, and the incident has not been independently verified.

Source: Reuters, November 3

A statement from the plant gave no indication of where the incident occurred. It said the employee was the third killed in the past two weeks and the 13th since April — a running toll the management itself is counting, covering plant staff killed in attacks it attributes to Ukraine.

Source: Reuters, November 3

"Attacks on civilian cars, killing of peaceful people — this is targeted terrorism. People must not become targets," the plant's statement said, in the wording reported by Reuters. That characterisation is the plant management's own; no Ukrainian statement on this incident had been published when the wire moved.

Source: Reuters, November 3

Plant official Yevgenia Yashina added a formal step. "We will inform the IAEA of our employee's death," Yashina said, according to Russia's TASS news agency, reported by the SRNA agency — meaning the plant intends to put this death on the record of the UN nuclear watchdog's inspectors, who monitor the site.

Source: TASS via SRNA, November 3

A plant held since 2022, and a staff toll that keeps rising

Russian forces seized the plant, Europe's largest with six reactors, in the first weeks of Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022. The facility is currently offline. Each side has since regularly accused the other of military actions that compromise nuclear safety around the site, Reuters noted — which is why every claim from the plant has to be read as one side's account until an independent body confirms it.

Source: Reuters, November 3

The pattern behind Tuesday's toll is documented in the plant's own recent history. The IAEA said last week that an employee at the plant had been killed, but gave no details. In July, the head of Russia's state nuclear corporation Rosatom said the plant's chief engineer had been killed by a Ukrainian drone near the station. A separate, earlier incident at the same plant — a driver killed after two days of drone attacks on staff buses in October — was reported on this site at the time; Tuesday's car incident is a different event, with a different victim and a different vehicle, and the plant counts it separately in its own tally.

Source: Reuters, November 3; Awaaz Punjab archive

The October incident at the same plant, in which a driver was killed in drone attacks on staff transport, was covered here earlier — Tuesday's deaths are a separate incident, not a repeat of that story. Read the earlier Zaporizhzhia plant driver story

Why staff deaths at an offline plant still matter

A shut-down reactor still needs people. Cooling, monitoring and maintenance at Zaporizhzhia depend on the staff who travel to and from the site every day, and the IAEA's Director General Rafael Grossi has repeatedly called for military restraint around the facility precisely because attacks that kill or frighten away those workers degrade nuclear safety even when no reactor is running. The Guardian's Ukraine war briefing on Tuesday night carried the same plant statement alongside President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's account of Russia's overnight barrage — 289 drones, 17 ballistic missiles and 59 cruise missiles hitting power plants and substations across Ukraine — a reminder that the plant sits inside a wider energy war, not outside it.

Source: Reuters, November 3; The Guardian Ukraine war briefing via EuropeSays, November 4

What happens next

Two responses will show whether Tuesday's claim becomes an established record or stays one side's account. First, whether the IAEA — which Yashina said would be informed — publishes its own note on the death, as it did for an employee killed last week, and what detail it is able to confirm. Second, whether Ukraine comments at all: Kyiv did not respond to this claim on Tuesday, and in earlier incidents at the plant each side's silence or denial has been part of the record. Until one of those lands, the verified facts are the plant management's statement, its toll — third in two weeks, 13th since April — and the absence, so far, of any independent confirmation of who fired the drone.