Russian forces have stored ammunition inside the turbine halls with reactors, placed guns on the roofs of the plant, and roam around with weaponry near the site where radioactive material is stored, all of which present an imminent danger to the safety of the plant, according to Petro Kotin, the president of Energoatom, Ukraine’s state nuclear plant operator. Do you think anything can be done safely? Nothing can be done safely-there is always risk. “We are in the middle of the most unconventional war. The Times of London reported last month that Ukrainian forces had already at least once attempted to recapture the plant, in a special forces raid that withdrew on meeting stiff resistance from the Russians.Īlina Frolova, a former Ukrainian deputy defense minister, agreed with Kharchenko that Ukraine had every right to reclaim its territory but added that there was no guarantee that a Ukrainian military operation could be carried out without risk of an escalation in an already fragile security dynamic at the plant. I am sure they are smart enough to change the situation to the better.” “The only solution is that the Ukrainian military retakes the power station. “Negotiations with a terrorist state won’t lead to anything,” said Oleksandr Kharchenko, the managing director of the Energy Industry Research Center in Kyiv. On the 37th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster last month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned of a repeat and said the presence of Russian troops at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant has “again put the world in danger.” He demanded that Russia be prevented from using nuclear power stations to “blackmail” Ukraine, presumably via an implicit threat if Ukrainian forces attempted to win back the region and its prime asset.įoreign Policy’s conversations with Ukrainian experts suggest they find a military operation to retake the nuclear plant more attractive than sitting idly by and waiting for a disaster as Russia deploys heavy armaments and uses the sensitive installation as a military base. During their stay, they dug trenches in the exclusion zone, which is still considered highly radioactive, imprudently exposing themselves to radiation. Russian troops occupied Chernobyl right after the launch of the full-scale invasion last February but evacuated the site at the end of March. In April 1986, an explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, 60 miles north of Kyiv, contaminated millions of acres of forest and agricultural land, poisoned fish, and led to deformities at birth in livestock-all that in addition to the devastating and direct impacts on humans, including thousands of recorded cases of cancer. Ukrainians have been on the receiving end of such a crisis earlier, too, under Soviet rule. A small action, deliberate or accidental, could trigger a meltdown at the site, with devastating impact on human life and the environment. Zaporizhzhia, the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, which fulfilled 20 percent of Ukraine’s electricity needs in peacetime, is on the front line of the war. Russians are still holed up in the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Enerhodar, implicitly threatening a nuclear catastrophe were Ukrainian forces parked on the other side of the Dnipro River to try to reclaim the region. It also poses a distinct military challenge, however. The rationale for focusing on Zaporizhzhia is clear enough: It lies on the land corridor along the Sea of Azov that connects Russian troops with their supply lines in eastern Ukraine all the way from the Donbas region to Crimea. Zaporizhzhia, one of the four regions Russia has annexed and claimed as a part of the Russian Federation, is at the heart of Ukraine’s strategy for its much-touted spring counteroffensive.
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