Rockets hit near nuclear plant
Ukraine, Russia blame each other
Ukraine accused Russian forces Sunday of imperiling a captured nuclear power plant, saying that a catastrophic radiation leak was “miraculously avoided” after rockets landed on the complex’s grounds. It was the latest threat to Europe’s largest nuclear facility, where fighting in the southern region has prompted fears of a major accident.
The rockets fired Saturday evening hit near a dry spent-fuel storage facility containing 174 casks, each with 24 assemblies of spent nuclear fuel, according
to Energoatom, Ukraine’s nuclear energy company. One person was wounded by shrapnel and many windows were damaged in the attack, which a pro-Russian regional official attributed to Ukrainian forces.
Russian forces have controlled the Zaporizhzhia plant since March, using it as a base to launch artillery barrages at the Ukrainian-controlled town of Nikopol across the Dnieper River for the past month. Saturday’s assault included a volley of rockets that Ukrainian officials said damaged 47 apartment buildings and houses, adding that Ukraine cannot answer the attacks for fear that a counterassault would set off a radiation disaster.
The stakes were made plainer Saturday night.
“Apparently, they aimed specifically at the casks with spent fuel, which are stored in the open near the site of shelling,” Energoatom said in a post on Telegram, a messaging platform. Three radiation detection monitors at the site were damaged, making it “currently impossible” to sense and respond to a radiation leak in a timely manner, the post said.
“There are still risks of hydrogen leakage and sputtering of radioactive substances, and the fire hazard is also high,” the nuclear energy company said in an earlier post.
The fighting, along with Russia’s occupation of parts of the plant and the stress borne by plant workers, prompted Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, to warn last week that “every principle of nuclear safety has been violated.”
Conditions at the plant are “out of control,” he added in an interview with the Associated Press on Tuesday.
Russia struck back at Ukraine’s assertions Sunday. The head of the pro-Russian administration in Zaporizhzhia, Yevgeny Balitsky, wrote on Telegram that Ukrainian forces had used an Uragan cargo rocket — a type of cluster weapon — to target the spent-fuel storage area and damage administrative buildings. Russia’s Defense Ministry has previously accused Ukraine of attacking the plant, saying Thursday that Ukraine had carried out an artillery strike against it.
But Ukraine insisted Russia was to blame. During a national television call-in program Sunday, the head of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia regional military administration, Oleksandr Starukh, said that there was only a threesecond delay between the firing and the landing of each shell — evidence, he said, that the attack had come from Russian forces.
Since invading Ukraine in February, Russia has made it a priority to seize critical infrastructure such as power plants, ports, transportation, and agricultural storage and production facilities.
A spokesman for Ukraine’s intelligence directorate said that Russia was shelling the Zaporizhzhia site to destroy infrastructure and to damage power lines.