Kyiv, Ukraine
Reuters
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Thursday Ukrainian spies had received information showing Russia was considering carrying out a “terrorist” attack at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant involving a release of radiation.
Speaking later, after a meeting of security chiefs and diplomats, the Ukrainian President issued a fresh call to put pressure on Russia to end its occupation of the plant, seized by Russian troops days after the February, 2022, invasion of Ukraine.
A Russian service member stands guard at a checkpoint near the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant outside Enerhodar in the Zaporizhzhia region, Russian-controlled Ukraine, on 15th June, 2023. PICTURE: Reuters/Alexander Ermochenko/File photo
UKRAINE’S ZELENSKIY: RUSSIA IS HIDING BODIES OF VICTIMS OF DAM BREACH
Russia has formed special groups to collect and hide bodies of people killed in the aftermath of the breach this month of the Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Thursday.
“The Russian evil has formed special groups there to remove and, obviously, hide the victims’ bodies,” Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address.
Zelenskiy described the situation in Russian-occupied parts of the region as “catastrophic to put it mildly”.
Ukraine and Russia have accused each other of being behind the breach.
The dam’s destruction sent high waters cascading through parts of southern Ukraine downriver from the dam, particularly the Kherson region, partly occupied by Russian troops.
Many people were forced onto rooftops to await rescue and Ukraine accused Russian occupying forces of inaction in helping those affected. Residents have lacked sanitation and drinking water.
Ukrainian officials have put the official death toll at 21, including five people who died from what they described as Russian shelling during evacuation operations. Russian officials have put the death toll at 46.
The Ukrainian military said on Thursday that the epidemiological situation in affected areas had worsened sharply, especially as regards the spread of hepatitis A.
Ukrainian Environment Minister Ruslan Strilets has estimated at more than $US1.5 billion the cost so far of the damage caused by the catastrophe.
– RON POPESKI and NICK STARKOV/Reuters
The Kremlin dismissed Zelenskiy’s allegation of an attack on the plant as “another lie”, and said a team of UN nuclear inspectors had visited the plant and rated everything highly.
The general director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, spent time at the plant last week. According to Russian reports, he was due to meet the head of Russia’s nuclear authority, Rosatom, on Friday in Russia’s Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad.
In a video statement on Telegram, Zelenskiy said Kyiv was sharing the information about the Russian-occupied facility in southern Ukraine with all its international partners from Europe and the US to China and India.
“Intelligence has received information that Russia is considering the scenario of a terrorist act at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant – a terrorist act with the release of radiation,” he said. “They have prepared everything for this.”
Zelenskiy did not say what evidence the intelligence agencies based their assertion on.
Each side has accused the other of shelling the six-reactor plant, Europe’s largest. International efforts to establish a demilitarised zone around it have so far failed.
“Unfortunately, I have had to remind [people] more than once that radiation knows no state borders. And who it will hit is determined only by the direction of the wind,” Zelenskiy said.
In his nightly video address, Zelenskiy said: “We need the complete de-occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station.
“And anyone who turns a blind eye to Russia’s occupation of such a facility, to Russia’s mining of the territory of the plant, is actually contributing not only to Russian evil but to terror in general.”
The world’s intelligence agencies, Zelenskiy said, had the means to “send appropriate signals and apply pressure. And this is what is needed.”
Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, suffered the world’s worst nuclear accident in 1986, when clouds of radioactive material spread across much of Europe after an explosion and fire at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant.
Zelenskiy made his statement two days after Ukraine’s military intelligence chief accused Russia of “mining” the pond used to keep the reactors cool at the Zaporizhzhia plant.
Russian forces have occupied swathes of Ukraine’s south and east and Moscow has unilaterally declared them a part of Russia. Moscow plans to conduct elections on the occupied territory there this September.
