Officials: Russia placed rocket launchers by nuclear reactor
KYIV, Ukraine — Russian forces installed multiple rocket launchers at Ukraine’s shut-down Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Ukrainian officials claimed Thursday, raising fears Europe’s largest atomic power station could be used as a base to fire on Ukrainian territory and heightening radiation dangers.
Ukraine’s nuclear company Energoatom said in a statement that Russian forces have placed several Grad multiple rocket launchers near one of the plant’s six nuclear reactors. It said the offensive systems are located at new “protective structures” the Russians secretly built, “violating all conditions for nuclear and radiation safety.” The claim could not be independently verified.
The Soviet-built launchers can fire rockets at ranges up to 25 miles, and Energoatom said they could enable Russian forces to hit the opposite bank of the Dnieper River, where each side blames the other for almost daily shelling in the cities of Nikopol and Marhanets. The plant is in a southern Ukrainian region the Kremlin has illegally annexed.
The Zaporizhzhia station has been under Russian control since the war’s early days. Although the risk of a nuclear meltdown is greatly reduced because all reactors have been shut down, experts have said radiation release is still possible. The reactors were shut down because the fighting kept knocking out external power supplies needed to run the reactors’ cooling systems and other systems.
The U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, has stationed inspectors at the plant and has been trying to persuade both sides in the conflict to agree to a demilitarized zone around it. The agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the reported Grad installation.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin said Thursday that it’s up to Ukraine’s president to end the military conflict, suggesting terms that Kyiv has repeatedly rejected, while Russian President Vladimir Putin vowed to press on with the fighting despite Western criticism.
The Kremlin has long said that Ukraine must accept Russian conditions to end the fighting. It has demanded that Kyiv recognize Crimea — a Ukrainian peninsula that Moscow illegally annexed in 2014 — as part of Russia and also accept Moscow’s other land gains in Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other officials have repeatedly rejected those conditions, saying the war will end when the occupied territories are retaken or Russian forces leave them.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow wasn’t aiming to grab new land but will try to regain control of areas in Ukraine from which it withdrew weeks after incorporating them into Russia in hastily called referendums — which Ukraine and the West reject. After earlier retreats from the Kyiv and Kharkiv areas, Russian troops last month left the city of Kherson and parts of the Kherson region.