Russia’s sustained bombardment of Ukraine’s power grid is deepening concerns about the safety of the country’s nuclear facilities after a drone knocked out power for more than three hours at the site of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in northern Ukraine, officials said Thursday. The drone strike adds to concerns raised more than a week ago when the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine became disconnected from the power grid following attacks that each side has blamed on the other.
Neither Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia is currently operational, but they require a constant power supply to run crucial cooling systems for spent fuel rods in order to avoid a potential nuclear incident. A blackout also could blind radiation monitoring systems installed to boost security at Chernobyl and operated by the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency. “Russia is deliberately creating the threat of radiation incidents,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said late Wednesday, criticizing the UN nuclear watchdog and its chief Rafael Mariano Grossi, for what he described as weak responses to the danger. Russian President Vladimir Putin rejected Ukrainian claims that Russia has been shelling the power lines around the Zaporizhzhia plant as “nonsense” and blamed Ukraine for attacking the Moscow-controlled plant, warning that Russia could respond in kind.
The war that followed Russia’s all-out invasion of its neighbour more than three years ago appears no closer to ending, despite months of U.S.-led peace efforts. Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address that Russia launched over 20 Shahed drones against energy infrastructure in Slavutych, the city whose power supply services Chernobyl, the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident. A wave of drones overwhelmed defences and caused a blackout on Wednesday, he said, affecting the sarcophagus that prevents radioactive dust from escaping the destroyed fourth reactor and storage housing more than 3,000 tons of spent fuel.
He did not provide details of how it was affected.”The Russians could not have been unaware that a strike on Slavutych would have such consequences for Chernobyl,” Zelenskyy said. Last February, a drone armed with a warhead hit Chernobyl’s protective outer shell, briefly starting a fire. Radiation levels there did not increase, officials said. The Zaporizhzhia plant, which is Europe’s biggest and one of the 10 biggest nuclear facilities in the world.
