The Russian forces occupying the Ukrainian nuclear power plant in Zaporizhia are preparing to connect it with Crimea, a peninsula annexed by Moscow in 2014, and are damaging it by carrying out this reorientation of electricity production, the Ukrainian operator Energoatom warned on Tuesday.
“The Russian military present at the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant is implementing the program of (Russian operator) Rosatom aimed at connecting the plant to Crimean power grids,” Energoatom president Petro Kotin told Ukrainian television.
“When the last production line is disconnected, the plant will be powered by diesel-powered generators. Everything will then depend on its reliability and fuel stocks,” Petro Kotin also warned.
“suicide”
Located near the city of Energodar on the Dnieper River, not far from the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea (south), the plant, the largest in Europe, has six of the 15 Ukrainian reactors, capable of supplying four million homes. It came under the control of Russian troops on March 4, shortly after the start of the invasion of Ukraine on February 24.
Moscow and Kyiv have been accusing each other since Friday of bombing it, without any independent source being able to confirm this. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky raised the specter of the Chernobyl disaster.
“Any attack on nuclear power plants is suicidal,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned Monday morning. “I hope that these attacks will end. At the same time, I hope that the IAEA can gain access to the plant.”
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) considered this Saturday “increasingly alarming” the information from Zaporijjia, one of whose reactors had to be closed after a bombing the previous day.
Source: BFM TV
