UN nuclear watchdog sets emergency meeting
Francois Murphy
VIENNA – The United Nations nuclear watchdog’s 35-nation Board of Governors will hold an emergency meeting on Thursday at Ukraine and Russia’s request to discuss attacks on the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, the notification to member states seen by Reuters said.
Drones attacked the Russian-held facility in southern Ukraine, Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant, on Sunday, hitting one reactor building, the International Atomic Energy Agency has said, adding that nuclear safety was unaffected.
Russia and Ukraine have repeatedly accused one another of targeting Zaporizhzhia; both sides deny doing so.
The meeting is unlikely to bring clarity as to who was behind recent attacks. The Board has passed four resolutions since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 condemning Russian actions against Ukrainian nuclear facilities. The most recent was last month, calling on Russia to withdraw from Zaporizhzhia.
Only China has joined Russia in opposing those resolutions. Diplomats said they had not heard of a push for a resolution on Thursday, which would be more difficult at such short notice.
The International Atomic Energy Agency has not assigned blame for the attacks but demanded that they stop.
“Such reckless attacks significantly increase the risk of a major nuclear accident and must cease immediately,” IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi said after Sunday’s drone strikes.
Russia said it wanted a meeting on “the recent attacks and provocations of the armed forces of Ukraine” against Zaporizhzhia. The Ukrainian statement said Kyiv wanted to discuss “the situation in Ukraine and the safety, security and safeguards implications.”
The meeting’s agenda, also attached, had only one item: “matters referred to” in the letters.
The rules of the Board, the Vienna-based IAEA’s top decision-making body that meets several times a year, state that any country on it can call a meeting. Both Russia and Ukraine are on the board this year.
Ukraine says it destroyed drones
Ukraine’s air defense systems destroyed 20 attack drones launched by Russia overnight targeting seven Ukrainian regions across the country, Ukrainian Air Force Commander Mykola Oleshchuk said on Tuesday.
The drones were destroyed over southern Mykolaiv, Odesa, and Kherson regions, central regions of Dnipropetrovsk, Poltava, and Vinnytsia, as well as Lviv in the west, Oleshchuk said on the Telegram messaging app.
Maksym Kozytskyi, Lviv’s governor, said drone wreckage had damaged a critical infrastructure facility in the west of the country, causing a fire.
In the southern Odesa region, power lines were destroyed by the debris, governor Oleh Kiper said on the Telegram messaging app.
Ukraine’s Energy Ministry said equipment at an energy facility was damaged in the central Poltava region.
Ukraine’s air force said Russia launched four missiles from S-300 surface-to-air missile systems, but provided no details on what happened to those missiles.