This is an increasingly feared scenario: the risk of a major nuclear disaster around the Zaporijjia power plant, southeast of kyiv in Ukraine. Faced with this fear, Vladimir Putin accepted this Friday during a telephone conversation with Emmanuel Macron that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) send a mission to this plant, the largest in Europe.
On a visit to Ukraine, the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, also asked Russia not to cut off this power plant from the Ukrainian network, which its army has occupied since the beginning of March, and which has become the target in recent years. weeks of strikes that include Moscow and Kyiv blame each other.
Earlier in the day, the Ukrainian power plant operator Energoatom said he feared such a scenario, saying the Russian military was looking for supplies for diesel generators that would kick in after the reactors shut down and limit staff access to facilities. installations.
A situation of “high fragility”
“The systematic bombing (…) of the territory of the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant creates the danger of a large-scale disaster that could lead to radioactive contamination of vast territories,” the Russian president warned on Friday for the occasion. . from a telephone conversation with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron.
In a statement, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, “welcomed recent statements indicating that Ukraine and Russia support the IAEA’s goal of sending a mission” to Zaporizhia.
“In this highly volatile and fragile situation, it is vitally important that no further action is taken that could further jeopardize […] one of the largest nuclear power plants in the world,” insisted the head of the IAEA.
Modeling carried out by a Ukrainian institute of hydrometeorology also shows the effects of a nuclear disaster in Zaporizhzhia: a possible radioactive cloud could spread very quickly in Europe, in particular in Poland and in the Baltic countries, experts report.
More than 9,000 people evacuated from the region
“The restoration of full security” at this site “can begin after the mission has begun its work,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky commented on his part at night.
The day before in Lviv, where he met with the presidents of Ukraine and Turkey, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Anotnio Guterres, had estimated that “any potential damage in Zaporijjia would be suicide” and urged “demilitarize the plant”. On Friday, it was the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, who called on the Russians to “withdraw” from this site and “immediately return full control to its rightful owner, Ukraine.”
More than 21,000 people have been evacuated in ten days from the occupied territories, including more than 9,000 from the Zaporizhia region, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk announced.
Source: BFM TV
