Zelensky says Russia intentionally raising nuclear risk after Chernobyl power hit

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Russia of trying to create the risk of nuclear incidents, alleging Moscow had deliberately staged an attack that cut off power to the decommissioned Chernobyl nuclear power station.

Zelensky also said Moscow was also not taking any action to end an external power outage at the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, now into its ninth day, and was taking advantage of the “weak” position of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Zaporizhzhia, Europe’s largest nuclear power station, was captured by Russia during the early days of the war in 2022. Its six nuclear reactors are mostly shut down, but they still require electricity to maintain stability and prevent potential meltdowns.

External power was cut on September 23 during intense fighting in the area, and the site has been running off diesel generators ever since. Power has been repeatedly interrupted at the plant since Russia seized it, but the latest outage is the 10th and longest-running so far.

“While there is no immediate danger as long as [the generators] keep working, it is clearly not a sustainable situation in terms of nuclear safety,” IAEA director general Rafael Mariano Grossi said in a statement.

Zelensky, however, called it “an emergency situation” that was “a threat to absolutely everyone” and warned in a Telegram post that the site’s diesel generators were never designed to operate for so long.

Blaming Russia for cutting off the power, in a separate X message, Zelensky said Moscow was “doing absolutely nothing to fix the situation or allow Ukrainian specialists to restore the external power supply to the plant”.

“Russia is … taking advantage, unfortunately, of the weak stance of the IAEA and director general Rafael Grossi, as well as the dispersed global attention. Half-hearted or weak measures will not fix the situation”, he added.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Russia was doing everything to ensure safety at Zaporizhzhia, which he said had come under repeated fire from Ukrainian forces.

In another development, the US will provide Ukraine with intelligence for long-range missile strikes on Russia’s energy infrastructure, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing American officials, as the Trump administration weighs sending Kyiv powerful weapons that could put more targets in Russia within range.

Washington has long been sharing intelligence with Kyiv, but Wednesday’s report said the new development will make it easier for Ukraine to hit refineries, pipelines, power stations and other infrastructure with the aim of depriving the Kremlin of revenue and oil.

American officials are asking NATO allies to provide similar support, according to WSJ. Reuters could not immediately verify the report.

Chernobyl power cut

Zelensky said more than 20 Russian drones had been deployed in an attack on the town of Slavutych that cut power to the nearby Chernobyl plant for three hours.

Ukraine’s Energy Ministry said on Wednesday that “power surges” after the strikes had left the containment unit, built to minimise contamination from the world’s worst nuclear accident in 1986, without electricity.

Some 307,000 customers in the nearby Chernihiv region were also left without power supplies, the ministry said.

“The Russians could not have been unaware that a strike on facilities in Slavutych would have such consequences for Chornobyl,” Zelensky wrote on Telegram, using the Ukrainian form of Chernobyl, adding that large quantities of radioactive spent fuel remained there.

“And this was a deliberate attack in which they used more than 20 drones, according to preliminary assessments, Russian-Iranian Shaheds”, he said.

The IAEA, the UN’s nuclear watchdog, issued a statement acknowledging that Chernobyl had experienced “fluctuations” after losing its external power connection, but that alternative lines were used initially and power was later restored.

Russia has not yet commented on the incident.

Ukraine’s Energy Ministry statement made no mention of any increased risk of radioactive release as a result of the power shutdown at the site.

After Chernobyl’s fourth nuclear reactor exploded in April 1986 and spread radioactivity throughout Europe, Soviet engineers hurriedly erected a “sarcophagus” around the ruins.

This was replaced by a new confinement structure in 2016, while the plant’s other three reactors were gradually taken out of service.

Russian forces briefly occupied Chernobyl at the beginning of Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and a Russian drone pierced the confinement structure’s roof in February this year.

The Zaporizhzhia site was also seized in the same early stages of the war. Fighting, drone attacks and shelling have continued sporadically in and around the plant, with each side regularly accusing the other of endangering nuclear safety.

Reuters

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.