Staff at nuclear plant victims of ‘kidnapping’

RUSSIAN forces have kidnapped 11 employees of Europe’s largest nuclear power plant in occupied southern Ukraine, officials said yesterday.

At least 20 residents of the city of Energodar, including staff of its Zaporizhzhya nuclear plant, were kidnapped last week alone, city officials said.

“Their whereabouts are currently unknown,” the officials said on the Energodar Telegram channel.

Kidnappings have been reported across Russian-occupied areas, and Energodar’s deputy mayor has been held in captivity for weeks.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN nuclear watchdog, was criticised earlier this week for “legitimising” Russian occupation by preparing a mission to Energodar.

Ukraine’s nuclear energy agency Energoatom accused IAEA chief Rafael Grossi of lying when he said the mission had been requested by Ukraine.

Mr Grossi told the BBC the accusations were “absurd”.

A Kremlin spokesman confirmed last month that the IAEA had been in touch with them about a possible visit.

Russian state media say the staff of the plant now work under orders of Russia’s atomic energy agency, and it poses no security risk.

But the IAEA insisted that it needed to visit the site, which no longer transmits data to the agency’s global network, to make its own security assessment.

The IAEA said this week that radiation detectors from the Chernobyl power plant, which was under Russian control earlier on in the war, had resumed data transmission to its monitoring system for the first time since the start of the invasion.