Observers from the International Atomic Energy Agency have not been able to verify what happened.
▲ Fire under control at the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant towers, in an image provided by the press office of the Ukrainian presidency.Afp Photo
Juan Pablo Duch
Correspondent
The newspaper La Jornada
Monday, August 12, 2024, p. 27
Moscow. Russia accused Ukraine yesterday of attacking the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant with a drone and kyiv blamed Moscow for setting a fire, while observers from the International Atomic Energy Agency heard explosions in the early hours of the morning and saw a column of black smoke above the plant, without being able to verify what really happened.
As a result of the shelling of the city of Energodar by the Ukrainian army, a fire broke out in a cooling system facility at the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant.Eduard Balitsky, the ruler of the part of the region that Russia considers its own, said on Sunday evening.
He added: Currently, all (six) power units are in cold shutdown mode, there is no danger of steam explosion and other consequences. Radiation around the nuclear power plant and the city of Energodar does not exceed the norm..
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has distanced his country from the attack, saying that the Russian administration of the nuclear plant set the fire, while the head of Ukraine’s Nikopol administration, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, said: According to unofficial information received from our sources on the other side of the river, the Russians burned a large number of tires in one of the cooling rooms of the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant..
Ukrainian officials suggest that Russia is trying to divert attention from the fighting in Russia’s Kursk region by blaming Ukraine for the attack on the nuclear plant.
Apart from this incident, there have been no major changes in the tone of what has been happening in Kursk for almost a week now. It is clear that the armed conflict between Moscow and kyiv now has a new front and, something inconceivable until recently, this war scenario is on the internationally recognized territory of Russia.
Both on Saturday and Sunday, both the Russians, who did not intend to do so, and the Ukrainians, who were instead interested in knowing, confirmed yesterday that the fighting had continued for the sixth consecutive day.
The Russian Ministry of Defense continued to report, as it does daily, that it was able to frustrate the attempt to advance in this or that place in Kursk, further and further away from the common border, while President Zelensky continued without referring explicitly to the place of the operation, considering all kinds of metaphors such as that his army shows signs of shifting the war to the enemy’s soil (on Saturday) or distributing a photo of the commander-in-chief of his army, Oleksandr Syrskyi, looking at a map and with the brief caption: The operation continues (on Sunday).
Ukraine believes that this way it does not give the Kremlin any formal grounds to accuse it of being the second country since World War II whose troops have invaded Russian territory (the first time was in 1969, when Chinese soldiers tried to occupy the border island of Damansky, known as Zhenbao for China).
Russia, whose President Vladimir Putin described as large-scale provocation What began on August 6 and, in that logic, should have ended the next day, prefers to warn through its spokesmen that The Russian response will be forceful and will not take long to arrive.
Russian Z-bloggers, journalists and analysts who support the special military operationthey argue that the situation It’s not critical, but it’s still complicated and several are concerned that not all of the Ukrainian brigades (each with 4-5 thousand fighters) that are stationed on the border have yet entered.
Some blame General Valery Gerasimov, the army chief of staff and commander-in-chief of the Ukraine campaign, for failing to heed Russian intelligence warnings that a Ukrainian attack was in the works and for failing to notify the Kremlin, but it is unclear whether the leaks to the Z-blockers are intended to exonerate those responsible for obtaining secrets about the Ukrainian plans or are an attempt by Gerasimov’s adversaries within the military to pin yet another blunder on him.
However, it was striking that Putin did not ask Gerasimov to coordinate the anti-terrorist operation regime in Kursk, Belgorod and Bryansk, regions bordering Ukraine, but the measure was formally imposed by the Russian National Anti-Terrorist Committee, headed by Aleksandr Bortnikov, director of the FSB (Russian acronym for the Federal Security Service).
This regime allows for the reinforcement of the protection of key installations such as the Kursk nuclear power plant, restricting the movement of the population, confiscating vehicles and intercepting telephone calls, among other resources, to ensure the safety of citizens and maintain public order in the face of what he called unprecedented attempt to destabilize the situation in several regions of Russia by the Ukrainian spy services.
Exodus in border areas
The exodus of civilians from Russia’s border regions with Ukraine, but especially from Kursk, continued. The 76,000 people who Russian authorities acknowledged on Saturday as having been evacuated from Kursk in buses provided by municipalities and in cars of their own free will were joined yesterday by 8,500 inhabitants who had to leave their homes in the combat zone.
Tensions have returned to Ukraine’s border with Belarus. Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko on Saturday ordered his army to reinforce its presence in the south of the country, an ally of Russia, after accusing Kiev of violating its airspace with drones, which he said it had shot down.