UN Secretary-General António Guterres called for international inspectors to be allowed access to the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant after Ukraine and Russia traded accusations of shelling Europe’s largest nuclear power plant at the weekend.”Any attack on a nuclear power plant is a suicidal thing,” Guterres told a news conference in Japan on Monday, two days after attending a peace memorial ceremony in Hiroshima to mark the 77th anniversary of the world’s first atomic bombing.
Guterres said the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) needed access to the plant. “We fully support the IAEA in all its efforts in relation to creating the conditions to stabilize the plant,” Guterres said.Ukraine said renewed Russian shelling on Saturday damaged three radiation sensors and injured a worker at the Zaporizhia power plant, the second strike in consecutive days at the site.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Russia of leading a “nuclear terror” that has prompted yet another round of international sanctions, this time against Moscow’s nuclear sector. “There is no such nation in the world that can feel safe when a terrorist state fires at a nuclear power plant,” Zelenskiy said in a televised speech on Sunday.
Russian forces captured the factory in southeastern Ukraine in early March, but it is still run by Ukrainian technicians. Russian authorities in the area said Ukrainian forces hit the site with multiple rocket launchers, damaging administrative buildings and an area near the storage facility. The Russian Embassy in Washington also issued a statement detailing the damage.
Ukrainian nationalists launched an artillery strike on the territory of the said object on August 5. As a result of the shelling, two high voltage lines and a water pipe were damaged. Only due to the effective and timely actions of the Russian military in covering the nuclear facility, its critical infrastructure was not affected,” the embassy said.
The head of Zaporizhzhia’s occupation authorities, Yevgeny Balitskyi, said that the blame lies with Ukrainian forces who, by shelling the power plant, “decided to bring the whole of Europe to the brink of a nuclear disaster.” Ukraine claims that Russia has turned the plant into a military base, making it extremely difficult to target Russian troops and equipment inside. Since mid-July, Russia has been using the power plant as a cover from which to fire on Ukrainian forces.
The Washington-based think tank Institute for the Study of War (ISW) assessed on August 3 that Russian forces are likely using the plant to “play on Western fears of a nuclear disaster in Ukraine in an effort to degrade Western willingness to provide military support to the Ukrainian counter-offensive “. ISW further stated that Russia is “effectively using the plant as a nuclear shield to prevent Ukrainian strikes on Russian forces and equipment.”
It was not possible to independently determine which party was responsible for the attack on the power plant. IAEA chief Rafael Mariano Grossi warned on Saturday that the latest attack “underscores the very real risk of nuclear catastrophe”.Elsewhere, Russia is strengthening its positions and numbers on Ukraine’s southern front to prepare for a Ukrainian counter-offensive and is likely to prepare the ground for an attack, according to British and Ukrainian military officials.
Russian troops are almost certainly massing in the south, either awaiting a Ukrainian counteroffensive or preparing to attack. Long convoys of Russian military trucks, tanks, artillery and other items continue to move from Donbas to the southwest,” the British Ministry of Defense said, confirming an earlier claim by Ukraine’s deputy chief of military intelligence.
According to a separate Ukrainian military intelligence source, Russian forces are creating fire damage along the front lines in the occupied Kherson region to prevent Ukrainian forces from pushing out of their positions, and are adding additional units to attack Mykolaiv and southern Dnipropetrovsk region, as well as conducting aerial reconnaissance of the area using drones. In the occupied region of Zaporozhye, the Russians are actively attacking Ukrainian troops and bringing in new troops to bolster their numbers, the same source said.
