The New York Times:

By David E. Sanger

Rafael Grossi slipped into Moscow a few weeks ago to meet quietly with the man most Westerners never engage with these days: President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

Mr. Grossi is the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, and his purpose was to warn Mr. Putin about the dangers of moving too fast to restart the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which has been occupied by Russian troops since soon after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

But as the two men talked, the conversation veered off into Mr. Putin’s declarations that he was open to a negotiated settlement to the war in Ukraine — but only if President Volodymyr Zelensky was prepared to give up nearly 20 percent of his country.

A few weeks later, Mr. Grossi, an Argentine with a taste for Italian suits, was in Tehran, this time talking to the country’s foreign minister and the head of its civilian nuclear program. At a moment when senior Iranian officials are hinting that new confrontations with Israel may lead them to build a bomb, the Iranians signaled that they, too, were open to a negotiation — suspecting, just as Mr. Putin did, that Mr. Grossi would soon be reporting details of his conversation to the White House.

In an era of new nuclear fears, Mr. Grossi suddenly finds himself at the center of two of the world’s most critical geopolitical standoffs. In Ukraine, one of the six nuclear reactors in the line of fire on the Dnipro River could be hit by artillery and spew radiation. And Iran is on the threshold of becoming a nuclear-armed state.

It is not the role he expected when, after a 40-year career in diplomacy that was focused on the nuts and bolts of nonproliferation, he was elected director-general of the agency by the barest majority after the sudden death of his predecessor, Yukiya Amano. That was “before anyone could imagine that Europe’s largest nuclear power plant would be on the front line of a war,” he said in one of a series of conversations at the agency’s headquarters in Vienna, or that Israel and Iran would exchange direct missile attacks for the first time in the 45 years since the Iranian revolution.

Today he has emerged as perhaps the most activist of any of the I.A.E.A.’s leaders since the agency was created in 1957, an outgrowth of President Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program to spread nuclear power generation around the globe. He has spent most of the past four and a half years hopping the globe, meeting presidents and foreign ministers, pressing for more access to nuclear sites and, often, more authority for an organization that traditionally has had little power to compel compliance.

But along the way, he has been both a receiver and sender of messages, to the point of negotiating what amounts to a no-fire zone immediately around Zaporizhzhia.

Mr. Grossi has his critics, including those who believe he acted beyond his authority when he stationed inspectors full-time in the embattled plant, at a moment when armed Russians with little knowledge of nuclear power were patrolling the control room. He was also betting that neither side would want to attack the plant if it meant risking the lives of United Nations inspectors.

It worked. Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, recalls being so concerned about a nuclear disaster early in the Ukraine conflict that he had the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration on the phone describing what would happen if a reactor was struck and a deadly radioactive cloud wafted across Europe. “It was a terrifying scenario,” he said later.

Two years later, “we are moving into a period of protracted status quo,” Mr. Grossi said. “But from the beginning I decided I could not just sit on the sidelines and wait for the war to end, and then write a report on ‘lessons learned.’ That would have been a shame on this organization.”

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