Apparently, fighting has resumed in the area around the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine, which is occupied by Russian troops. According to the local administration, Russia would have thwarted Ukrainian attacks on the nuclear plant and the nearby occupied city of Enerhodar thanks to its air defenses. Meanwhile, the UN Security Council is meeting for an emergency meeting on Thursday to discuss the situation at the nuclear plant.
The 15 member states of the Security Council want to consult in New York at the request of Russia. Rafael Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), will inform the Security Council about the security situation at the plant, according to his agency. Heavy bombing was reported in the area for days.
Alongside China, France, Britain and the US, Russia is a permanent member of the Security Council and has the right of veto. According to information from the circles of the Presidency of the Security Council, the meeting is scheduled for Thursday at 15:00 local time (21:00 CEST). China currently holds the presidency.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned the international community of a new nuclear disaster similar to the one at Chernobyl in 1986. Russia is a terrorist state that holds the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant hostage and uses it for blackmail, he said on Thursday via link video at the start of a donor conference on Ukraine in Copenhagen. Today, Russia is even more cynical and even more dangerous than the Soviet Union, which once wanted to keep the Chernobyl nuclear disaster a secret.
Nuclear power plant one of the largest in the world
“We have to protect Europe from this threat,” Zelenskyy said. Zaporizhia is not only the biggest nuclear power plant in Europe, but also one of the biggest in the world. The reaction to Russian actions must be comprehensive. Ukraine needs maximum armament and ammunition for defense. “Nobody needs new catastrophes,” Zelenskyy said. The #CopenhagenUkraine donor conference on Thursday was supposed to be about weapons, training soldiers and helping to clear Ukraine.
Located in southern Ukraine, the plant is the largest nuclear power plant in Europe and has six of Ukraine’s 15 nuclear reactors. According to Ukrainian information, two of them are currently connected to the electricity grid. The plant has been occupied by the Russian army since early March and is not far from the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014.
According to Ukrainian authorities, Russia, meanwhile, launched massive fire into eastern Ukraine. On Thursday night, 120 rockets hit the area around the city of Nikopol. The governor of Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, Valentyn Resnichenko, said three people were killed and seven wounded in the bombing. Russia has been trying for weeks to gain control of the entire Donbass region of eastern Ukraine.
While Russian troops already control the region around the city of Luhansk, Russian troops are increasingly attacking in the Donetsk district. There is also said to be heavy fighting over the town of Pisky in eastern Ukraine. An official from the Russian-backed People’s Republic of Donetsk said the site, ten kilometers northwest of the capital of the province of the same name, is controlled by Russian and separatist forces. Ukrainian officials denied that the heavily fortified city, key to Donetsk’s defenses, had fallen.
The Russian Defense Industry is in Trouble
According to British intelligence experts, Russia can no longer fully comply with its foreign orders in the arms industry. “Russia is probably unable to fulfill some of its export orders for armored vehicles,” the Defense Ministry’s Ukrainian newspaper War Intelligence Update said in London on Thursday.
The reason for this is the extraordinary demand for armored fighting vehicles for Russia’s own armed forces in Ukraine and the growing effect of Western sanctions, the statement continues. For example, Belarus recently presented details of a main battle tank that was developed in its own country. Previously, this task had fallen to the Russian state arms company UralWagonZavod.
According to the British, the reputation of the Russian arms industry abroad also suffered: “The credibility of many of its weapons systems was undermined by the connection with the poor performance of the Russian armed forces in the Ukraine war,” the statement said. (Portal/dpa/afp)