Ukraine said on Friday that Russian President Vladimir Putin had “ordered the preparation of a terrorist attack” at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The station’s main power supply – the site of the 1986 explosion and accident that traumatized the world – was cut off on Wednesday as Ukrainian authorities blamed Russian invading forces for the blackout and warned it could lead to a “nuclear blast.”
National agency of emergency services of Ukraine. said if the plant’s cooling systems, which keep the spent nuclear fuel safely in the water, are not powered, this could create a “radioactive cloud” that will fall on “other regions of Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and Europe.”
The UN-backed World Nuclear Watch Agency, the IAEA, downplays fears of an imminent radioactive release, saying the spent fuel is old enough and there is enough water in cooling tanks around it to prevent a catastrophe even without electricity. IAEA and Ukrainian officials said standby diesel generators at the site would also be able to keep vital systems running for two to three days.
On Thursday, Russia said the power cable had been repaired by a team of engineers who arrived in Ukraine from Belarus, but the IAEA and Ukrainian officials said work to repair the line was still ongoing.
This was followed by a warning from the intelligence department of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine that “a man-made disaster is planned at the Russian-controlled Chernobyl nuclear power plant.” [Nuclear Power Plant]responsibility for which the occupiers will try to shift to Ukraine.”
Conflict in Ukraine renews concerns about nuclear safety 01:41
CBS News is requesting information about the alleged Russian plot from US and IAEA officials. US and European officials have been warning for weeks, even before Putin ordered an invasion of Ukraine, that the Russian leader might try to stage false flag attacks to frame Ukraine as a pretext for military action.
The Ukrainian government said in a Friday statement that Chernobyl remained completely offline from the IAEA’s monitoring systems and was “de-energized”, noting two days after the blackout that “the life of the existing diesel generators is rated for 48 hours of operation.” maintenance of security systems.
Russian forces in control of the plant have “denied access to the station to Ukrainian repairmen,” the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said in a statement on Friday. Among the engineers sent from Belarus, allegedly, were Russian “saboteurs” posing as nuclear scientists who came to “organize a terrorist attack.”
Russian forces quickly captured the Chernobyl site after the invasion began on 24 February. Ukrainian officials said a group of nuclear power plant operators who ensure safety at the decommissioned facility tried to continue their work, but were allowed to leave the area by order of Russian troops and without even being allowed to leave.
Since then, Russia has taken over another Ukrainian nuclear power plant – fully operational and the largest in Europe.
All normal means of communication between Chernobyl and the Ukrainian government have been interrupted.
A State Department spokesman told CBS News on Friday that the US condemned Russia’s takeover of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and called on Russian forces to immediately withdraw all of Ukraine’s nuclear facilities and allow power and safe working conditions to be restored.
“Russia recognizes the importance of being a responsible nuclear power and should act accordingly,” the spokesman said, calling the country’s actions “extremely irresponsible and dangerous.”
Asked Thursday about safety concerns at Chernobyl, U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haynes told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the U.S. “should be concerned, but we haven’t seen anything yet that takes us from worry to ‘this is a total crisis. “. ‘”
Matt Kroenig, who handled both nuclear and Russia-related issues during the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations, told CBS News Senior Correspondent Katherine Herridge this week that Putin is arming Ukraine’s civilian nuclear facilities as part of a strategy of terror and possibly , organize a major nuclear event.
“It could be a nuclear threat without resorting to the use of [nuclear] weapons,” Kronig said. “If there were an accident at these plants, it could be very serious. We have seen serious accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima in the past, and so I think this could be part of a strategy to put plants at risk and make people worry about a potential nuclear catastrophe.”
The biggest threats around the Zaporozhye nuclear facility in Ukraine 04:23
Kroenig said that in addition to triggering a real nuclear catastrophe, Putin could also use his forces’ control of both Chernobyl and Ukraine’s vast, still-functioning Zaporozhye nuclear power plant to “terrorize the Ukrainian people and the world more broadly” as his military intervention was suffering unexpected delays as it approached the major cities of Ukraine.
“The worst-case scenario,” said Kroenig, a former CIA officer who is currently deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, “is that you could have a nuclear holocaust.”
If the cooling systems at Chernobyl are allowed to fail, “the nuclear zone could literally melt, the radioactive material could melt, it could get into the earth’s crust, it could get into the water supply… so this is a potentially serious environmental disaster. “
Kronig didn’t go so far as to suggest that Putin might orchestrate an attack on one of Ukraine’s nuclear facilities, but he did say that Putin’s actions could lead to a major nuclear incident.
Any deliberate attack on a nuclear power plant would be considered a war crime under the Geneva Conventions, a series of laws signed by all United Nations member states, including Russia, that regulate military action.
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