KYIV, Ukraine
A fire at Europe’s biggest nuclear plant ignited by Russian shelling has been extinguished, Ukrainian authorities said Friday, and Russian forces have taken control of the site.
There was damage to the
compartment of reactor No. 1 at the Zaporizhzhia plant in the city of
Enerhodar, but it does not affect the safety of the power unit, the regional
military administration said in a statement. It added that operational
personnel are ensuring its safety. No information was immediately available
about casualties. Ukrainian officials said that radiation levels in the area
weren’t at dangerous levels.
The shelling of the plant came
as the Russian military pressed their attack on a crucial energy-producing
Ukrainian city and gained ground in their bid to cut off the country from the
sea. As the invasion entered its second week, another round of talks between
Russia and Ukraine yielded a tentative agreement to set up safe corridors to
evacuate citizens and deliver humanitarian aid.Serhii, father of teenager Iliya, cries on his son's lifeless body lying on a stretcher at a maternity hospital converted into a medical ward in Mariupol, Ukraine, Wednesday, March 2, 2022.
Leading nuclear authorities
were worried — but not panicked — about the damage to the power station. The
assault, however, led to phone calls between Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelenskyy and U.S. President Joe Biden and other world leaders. The U.S. Department
of Energy activated its nuclear incident response team as a precaution.
Earlier, nuclear plant
spokesman Andriy Tuz told Ukrainian television that shells fell directly on the
facility and set fire to one of its six reactors. That reactor is under renovation
and not operating, but there is nuclear fuel inside, he said.
The Zaporizhzhia regional
military administration said that measurements taken at 7 a.m. Friday (0500
GMT) showed radiation levels in the region “remain unchanged and do not
endanger the lives and health of the population.”
The mayor of Enerhodar, Dmytro
Orlov, announced on his Telegram channel Friday morning that “the fire at the
(nuclear plant) has indeed been extinguished.” His office told The Associated
Press that the information came from firefighters who were allowed onto the
site overnight.
The assault renewed fears that
the invasion could damage one of Ukraine’s 15 nuclear reactors and set off
another emergency like the 1986 Chernobyl accident, the world’s worst nuclear
disaster, which happened about 110 kilometers (65 miles) north of the capital.
British Prime Minister Boris
Johnson called for an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council in “coming
hours” to raise the issue of Russia’s attack on the nuclear power plant, according
to a statement from his office.
U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer
Granholm tweeted that the Zaporizhzhia plant’s reactors were protected by
robust containment structures and were being safely shut down.
In an emotional speech in the
middle of the night, Zelenskyy said he feared an explosion that would be “the
end for everyone. The end for Europe. The evacuation of Europe.”
“Only urgent action by Europe
can stop the Russian troops,” he said. “Do not allow the death of Europe from a
catastrophe at a nuclear power station.”
But most experts saw nothing to indicate an impending disaster.
The International Atomic
Energy Agency said the fire had not affected essential equipment and that
Ukraine’s nuclear regulator reported no change in radiation levels. The
American Nuclear Society concurred, saying that the latest radiation levels
remained within natural background levels.
“The real threat to Ukrainian
lives continues to be the violent invasion and bombing of their country,” the
group said in a statement.
Orlov, the mayor of Enerhodar,
said Russian shelling stopped a few hours before dawn, and residents of the
city of more than 50,000 who had stayed in shelters overnight could return
home. The city awoke with no heat, however, because the shelling damaged the
city’s heating main, he said.
Prior to the shelling, the
Ukrainian state atomic energy company reported that a Russian military column
was heading toward the nuclear plant. Loud shots and rocket fire were heard
late Thursday.
Later, a livestreamed security
camera linked from the homepage of the Zaporizhzhia plant showed what appeared
to be armored vehicles rolling into the facility’s parking lot and shining
spotlights on the building where the camera was mounted.
Then there were what appeared to
be muzzle flashes from vehicles, followed by nearly simultaneous explosions in
surrounding buildings. Smoke rose into the frame and drifted away.
Vladimir Putin’s forces have
brought their superior firepower to bear over the past few days, launching hundreds
of missiles and artillery attacks on cities and other sites around the country
and making significant gains in the south.
The Russians announced the
capture of the southern city of Kherson, a vital Black Sea port of 280,000, and
local Ukrainian officials confirmed the takeover of the government headquarters
there, making it the first major city to fall since the invasion began a week
ago.
A Russian airstrike on
Thursday destroyed the power plant in Okhtyrka, leaving the city without heat
or electricity, the head of the region said on Telegram. In the first days of
the war, Russian troops attacked a military base in the city, located between
Kharkiv and Kyiv, and officials said more than 70 Ukrainian soldiers were
killed.
“We are trying to figure out
how to get people out of the city urgently because in a day the apartment
buildings will turn into a cold stone trap without water, light or
electricity,” Dmytro Zhyvytskyy said.
Heavy fighting continued on
the outskirts of another strategic port, Mariupol, on the Azov Sea. The battles
have knocked out the city’s electricity, heat and water systems, as well as
most phone service, officials said. Food deliveries to the city were also cut.
Associated Press video from
the port city showed the assault lighting up the darkening sky above deserted
streets and medical teams treating civilians, including a 16-year-old boy
inside a clinic who could not be saved. The child was playing soccer when he
was wounded in the shelling, according to his father, who cradled the boy’s
head on the gurney and cried.
Severing Ukraine’s access to
the Black and Azov seas would deal a crippling blow to its economy and allow
Russia to build a land corridor to Crimea, seized by Moscow in 2014.
Overall, the outnumbered,
outgunned Ukrainians have put up stiff resistance, staving off the swift
victory that Russia appeared to have expected. But a senior U.S. defense
official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Russia’s seizure of Crimea
gave it a logistical advantage in that part of the country, with shorter supply
lines that smoothed the offensive there.
Ukrainian leaders called on
the people to defend their homeland by cutting down trees, erecting barricades
in the cities and attacking enemy columns from the rear. In recent days,
authorities have issued weapons to civilians and taught them how to make
Molotov cocktails.
“Total resistance. ... This is
our Ukrainian trump card, and this is what we can do best in the world,”
Oleksiy Arestovich, an aide to Zelenskyy, said in a video message, recalling
guerrilla actions in Nazi-occupied Ukraine during World War II.
The second round of talks between Ukrainian and Russian delegations was held in neighboring Belarus. But the two sides appeared far apart going into the meeting, and Putin warned Ukraine that it must quickly accept the Kremlin’s demand for its “demilitarization” and declare itself neutral, renouncing its bid to join NATO.
Putin told French President
Emmanuel Macron he was determined to press on with his attack “until the end,”
according to Macron’s office.
The two sides said that they
tentatively agreed to allow cease-fires in areas designated safe corridors, and
that they would seek to work out the necessary details quickly. A Zelenskyy
adviser also said a third round of talks will be held early next week.
Despite a profusion of
evidence of civilian casualties and destruction of property by the Russian
military, Putin decried what he called an “anti-Russian disinformation
campaign” and insisted that Moscow uses “only precision weapons to exclusively
destroy military infrastructure.”
Putin claimed that the Russian
military had already offered safe corridors for civilians to flee, but he
asserted without evidence that Ukrainian “neo-Nazis” were preventing people
from leaving and were using them as human shields.
The Pentagon set up a direct
communication link to Russia’s Ministry of Defense earlier this week to avoid
the possibility of a miscalculation sparking conflict between Moscow and
Washington, according to a U.S. defense official who spoke on condition of
anonymity because the link had not been announced. - AP
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