LONDON/LVIV, Ukraine (Reuters) – The head of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency warned that whoever fired artillery at Ukraine’s Zaporizhia nuclear power plant was “playing with fire” as his team prepared to inspect it on Monday for damage. weekend strikes.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said the attacks on Europe’s largest nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine came as battles raged in the east as Russian forces pounded Ukrainian positions along the front line.
The bombing of the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant follows setbacks for Russian forces in the Kherson region in the south and a Russian response that included barrages of missile strikes across the country, many of them on power facilities.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said more than a dozen explosions rocked the nuclear plant late Saturday and Sunday. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, said the attacks were deeply disturbing and totally unacceptable.
“Whoever is behind this must stop immediately. As I have said many times before, you are playing with fire!” Grossi said in a statement.
Russia and Ukraine have blamed each other for bombing the facility, as they have done repeatedly in recent months after attacks on or near it.
An IAEA team on the ground, citing information provided by station management, said there was damage to some buildings, systems and equipment, but none critical to nuclear safety and security.
Grossi said the team plans to conduct an evaluation on Monday, but Russian nuclear power company Rosenerguatum said there would be limitations on what the team could examine.
“If they want to inspect a facility that has nothing to do with nuclear safety, access to it will be denied,” Rinat Karcha, advisor to the CEO of Rosenergoatom, told the Tass news agency.
The repeated bombing of the plant raised fears of a serious accident occurring just 500 kilometers (300 mi) from the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident, the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
Zaporizhia supplied about a fifth of Ukraine’s electricity before the Russian invasion, and had to run on back-up generators several times. It has six Soviet-designed VVER-1000 V-320 water-cooled reactors and two uranium-235 water-moderate reactors.
The reactors are out of order but there is a risk of overheating of the nuclear fuel if the power driving the cooling systems is cut off. The bombing has repeatedly cut power lines.
Russia’s defense ministry said Ukraine fired shells at the power lines supplying the plant but Ukrainian nuclear power company Energoatom accused the Russian military of bombing the site, saying the Russians had targeted infrastructure needed to restart parts of the plant in a bid to limit Ukraine’s energy supply.
fiercest battles
In a video address, Zelensky said Russian forces had bombarded Ukrainian front-line positions with artillery fire in eastern Ukraine, with the fiercest attacks being in the Donetsk region.
Russia withdrew its forces from the southern city of Kherson this month and moved some to reinforce its positions in the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions, an industrial region known as Donbass.
“The heaviest fighting, as before, is in the Donetsk region. Although there have been fewer attacks today due to bad weather, the volume of Russian bombing is unfortunately still very high,” Zelensky said.
“In the Luhansk region, we are slowly moving forward during the fighting. So far, there have been nearly 400 artillery attacks in the east since the beginning of the day,” he said.
In an early update on Monday, the Ukrainian military confirmed heavy fighting over the past 24 hours, saying its forces had repelled Russian attacks in the Donetsk region while Russian forces were shelling the Luhansk region in the east and Kharkiv in the northeast.
In the south, Zelensky said the forces were “consistently and calculatedly destroying the potential of the occupiers” but gave no details.
The city of Kherson is still without electricity, running water or heating.
Ukraine said on Saturday that about 60 Russian servicemen were killed in a long-range artillery attack in the south, the second time in four days that Ukraine has claimed heavy casualties in a single incident.
On Sunday, Russia’s defense ministry said up to 50 Ukrainian servicemen had been killed the day before along the southern front line in Donetsk and 50 elsewhere.
Reuters could not immediately verify any reports on the battlefield.
Russia describes its invasion of Ukraine as a “special operation” to disarm and “discredit” its neighbor, though Kyiv and its allies say the invasion is an unprovoked war of aggression.
Kyiv-based military analyst Oleh Zhdanov said that according to his information, there have been Russian offensives on the front line at Bakhmut and Avdiivka in the Donetsk region, among others.
“The enemy is unsuccessfully trying to break through our defenses,” Zhdanov said in a video on social media. “We are resisting – they have suffered heavy losses.”
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge in London, Pavel Politiuk in Kyiv, Caleb Davis in Gdansk and David Leunggren in Ottawa; Additional reporting by Francois Murphy in Vienna and Lydia Kelly in Melbourne. Written by Guy Faulconbridge, David Leunggren and Shri Navaratnam; Editing by Robert Birsel
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