“They might try to challenge Russia in Zaporizhzhia Oblast,” a second senior European official surmised in a conversation with the Washington Examiner in a recent discussion of Ukrainian military options following the Russian retreat from Kherson. “They might cut the Russians into two parts, so you have Donbas on the one hand with Mariupol. On the other hand, you have part of Zaporizhzhia, part of Kherson oblast, and the Crimea.”

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Russian and Ukrainian officials throughout the conflict have accused each other of shelling near the plant or taking other steps to jeopardize the security of the facility. An eruption of strikes in recent days represented the latest “close call,” according to the United Nations’s nuclear watchdog.

“One Russian milblogger claimed that the shelling came from Russian-controlled territory south of the plant, but most Russian sources accused Ukraine,” the Institute for the Study of War noted Sunday.

A team of monitors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, which described the plant as “Europe’s largest nuclear power plant,” certified that “key equipment remained intact and there were no immediate nuclear safety or security concerns,” while Russia’s lead nuclear agency called for a “security zone” to be created around the plant.

“Much will depend on the activities of [IAEA Director General] Rafael Grossi, and much will depend on the outcome of his talks with Kyiv,” Rosatom Director General Alexey Likhachev said Monday, per state media. “A security zone will be possible only if it is approved by Washington. I don’t think that a large distance between Washington and Zaporizhzhia can be an argument for the United States to put the brakes on any decision on the security zone.”

Some pro-Russian observers suspect that “the Kremlin will transfer control over ZaporizhzhiaNPP to the IAEA and then to Kyiv” in tandem with a crackdown on Putin’s internal critics.

“The process of making more and more new ‘difficult decisions’ (in fact, without [sarcastic] quotation marks), started at the Security Council, has been launched,” one widely read analyst posted on social media, per the WarTranslated project. “Before the New Year, the country is waiting for the most unexpected political upheavals that, at best, will lead to an epiphany.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called for the establishment of a “demilitarized zone” around the plant in September, but that proposal would have necessitated the withdrawal of Russian troops. Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused Russia of “using the plant as a military base to fire at Ukrainians, knowing that they can’t and won’t shoot back,” and Russian nuclear energy agency officials have made a point to ban the IAEA nuclear inspectors from accessing certain areas of the power plant.

“Access will be given but strictly within their mandate,” Rosenergoatom adviser Renat Karchaa told Tass, a Russian state media outlet, on Sunday. “The IAEA is an organization addressing issues of nuclear security. Naturally, we will give them access to corresponding facilities. But [if] they want to inspect the facility [in an area] which has no relation to nuclear security, access will be denied — not because we want to conceal anything but because they should work within their mandate.”

Ukrainian Deputy Energy Minister Yaroslav Demchenkov echoed Blinken’s accusation on Monday, saying the plant “has been turned into a military camp.” Demchenkov, adding that Russia’s military deployment “regularly puts Europe on the brink of a nuclear disaster of the scale of the Fukushima accident,” argued that Western powers should seek “the denuclearization of Russia” by denying Russia the intellectual property and technology that its nuclear industry will need.

“It would be naive to believe that a state that easily shells and seizes nuclear power plants can have peaceful nuclear technologies,” Demchenkov told the Central European Energy Conference in Bratislava, Slovakia, on Monday. “Therefore, today we need to think not only about the abandonment of Russian gas and oil but also about the denuclearization of Russia, the prohibition of Russian nuclear technologies, business in this area, and access of Russian scientists to nuclear research.”

Ukraine’s energy agency leadership has accused Russia of planning to “steal” the power plant, as it was, by disconnecting it from the Ukrainian electric grid and integrating it into the Russian energy system. Ukrainian officials, for their part, regard the reclamation of the power plant as “a key condition to achieving victory” in the war and their long-term ambition to “replace Russia as the primary supplier of energy to the rest of Europe.”

“We should not be afraid of an energy crisis in the long term,” Demchenkov said. “Ukraine, with its nuclear capacities, renewable potential, including hydrogen and biogas, can replace Russia as a continental energy supplier. Energy will be a source of development, not fuel for wars.”

Although the presence of the nuclear plant makes fighting in Zaporizhzhia Oblast a more anxious prospect, some observers suspect that it would be an easier target for Ukrainian forces than the Donbas territories that Russia first seized in 2014 and have fortified throughout years of fighting.

“To break these lines, it will be much much more difficult,” the second senior European official said.

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The first official was less optimistic about the state of Russian defenses and more uncertain about the location of the next Ukrainian target.

“RU has fortified ZNPP area,” the first official wrote. “So, I am not sure is Donbas more fortified. Hundreds of RU soldiers inside ZNPP. Ukrainians would like to surprise everybody letting guess what is the next direction.”