KYIV, Ukraine — A fire caused by fresh shelling near Europe’s largest nuclear power plant resulted in the plant being disconnected from the national power grid on Monday, Ukrainian officials said. , raising concerns that despite the presence of UN inspectors, Conditions at the Russian-occupied facility could deteriorate rapidly and threaten a disaster.
The fire forced employees to cut off the plant’s last connection to its only external power supply reserve line, again putting critical cooling systems at risk relying solely on to emergency backup power, Herman Galushchenko, Ukraine’s Energy Minister, said Monday. .
Mr. Galushchenko said that the fire crews were unable to reach the site of the fire because the fighting around the factory continued.
The shelling, explosions and fires around the facility, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in southern Ukraine, have raised fears for months of a possible disaster, but amid conflicting claims and persistent fighting, it is difficult for international experts to assess the danger from a distance. Two members of a United Nations group, sent last week for facility inspectionstayed at the factory in hopes of keeping it safe and possibly reducing fighting in the area.
The plant is located in an area bordering the Russian-occupied Kherson region, the site of Ukraine’s biggest counter-offensive in months. On Monday, a Russian-installed official there briefly raised the possibility that the fighting could delay a referendum that the Kremlin would use as an excuse to consolidate control.
Monday’s fire and shelling only showed once again that the plant remains at serious risk – a vast facility where any number of factors could contribute to a potential nuclear disaster.
The fears have steadily increased since Russian soldiers take control of the factoryright after their invasion in February and Mounted artillery in the area during the summer. In addition, Ukraine also warned that factory workers are working in tiring and dangerous conditions.
Those concerns prompted the United Nations nuclear watchdog to send a small team through an active battlefield last week to inspect the plant.
The watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, said on Monday that the reserve line had been “intentionally disconnected to put out the fire.” The line itself is not damaged and will be reconnected once the fire is extinguished, the agency speak.
The agency said inspectors are expected to release a report on the overall condition of the plant on Tuesday.
Reactor number 6, the only reactor working reactor At the plant, which is still generating electricity for the facility itself, and as of Monday evening, engineers had not turned on the diesel generator, according to an official with Energoatom, the Ukrainian company responsible for operating the plant. . Edwin Lyman, a nuclear energy expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a private group in Cambridge, Mass., says it’s OK for a plant to rely on one of the reactors for power. is “not unique, but it is not standard practice”. to the cooling system.
In 2018, Mr. Lyman noted, the IAEA announced a technical document detailed backup procedure. The document says even plants of this capacity can experience “time limits, often hours,” for backup power.
Another expert, Najmedin Meshkati, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Southern California, warned that the peripheral blackout – which has occurred at the Zaporizhzhia plant at least twice in the past few weeks – is ““ one of the terrifying events that can happen to a nuclear plant.”
In Kherson province, where Ukraine is counter-attacking, officials have withheld details of the country’s activities, but on Monday evidence emerged that the military strike could have been break the plan by the Russian-backed provincial government holding a referendum in Kherson on joining Russia.
On Monday, the deputy head of the Russian-appointed administration in Kherson, Kirill Stremousov, said that “ongoing events” had forced the referendum to be delayed. He said Rossiya-1, a Russian state-run television network, that “this will be a realistic decision, because we are not jumping jobs”.
But hours later, in apparent contradiction to his earlier comments, he said: “There is no such pause. Everything is going according to plan.” He added that no date for the vote has been set.
Ukraine has made it a priority to prevent any referendum that could tie occupied lands closer to Russia, and its military intelligence unit on Monday said special forces had carried out Attacks on Russian strongholds are being used to prepare documents for the referendum.
“The place where the ballot papers for the fake referendum were stored has been destroyed,” the Ukrainian military said in a statement. “The warehouse was blown up by an explosion from inside the premises. All available printed material has been destroyed. “
The Ukrainians say that a Russian base guarding the warehouse was also destroyed. And a day earlier, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said his forces had recaptured two villages in the region.
Ukraine’s claims cannot be independently verified.
Almost immediately after Russian forces flooded the Kherson area early in the invasion, Moscow launched propaganda campaign and intimidation as a prelude to the kind of referendum that it held in Crimea in 2014, and that organized separatist forces in the eastern regions of Ukraine.
During the spring and summer, the occupation authorities arrested hundreds of people, replaced the currency with rubles, issued Russian passports, rerouted the internet to Russian internet servers, and introduced the program. The school’s teaching is approved by the Kremlin.
Residents in Kherson also reported that proxies had begun printing ballots for the referendum, and US officials warned that a “fake” vote could begin any day.
Ukraine’s push to regain territory and stop the referendum comes as it mounts a separate campaign abroad to keep Europe’s supporters united – and send cash and weapons – amid the crisis. scene of the deepening energy crisis caused by the Russian invasion.
The Kremlin has cut off oil and gas supplies in retaliation for Western sanctions, leading to fears of a difficult winter ahead for many across the continent and civil unrest. Reply, Germany announced Monday that it will keep two of its remaining three nuclear plants operating, delaying the country’s plans to move to denuclearization in its energy.
Over the months, Ukraine has built up its arsenal and trained its troops to use weapons recently supplied by the West. Its offensive at Kherson focused on isolating and attacking Russian forces west of the Dnipro, the river that bisects the country and empties into the Black Sea.
By attacking Russian ammunition depots and attacking four major river confluences, the Ukrainians hoped to starve some 15,000 to 25,000 Russian soldiers of weapons and supplies, forcing them to retreat, surrender, or perish.
The Ukrainian military said that the operation was a complex effort that included attacks on Russian positions, attacks on Russian forces behind enemy lines supported by Ukrainian parties, and attempts to weaken the morale of Russian soldiers.
The Ukrainian military has imposed restrictions on journalists and urged the public not to make details of their activities public. Moscow tried to turn the attack into a failure even before it began. But in recent days, several Russian military bloggers have noted Ukraine’s advances.
More than half of the local population is estimated to have fled since the Russian occupation began, but Intensified fighting now threatens to cut off civilians’ escape routes or trap them under shelling. Ukraine’s military high command said on Monday that Russian occupation forces in Kherson had imposed a ban on the movement of all local residents.
Western military analysts warn against drawing firm conclusions about the counterattack, given the limited amount of clear information and the abundance of competing claims.
On Monday, Ukraine’s military southern command announced that a regiment of Russia’s 1st Army had refused to fight, in part because they had too little support and supplies, including water. Western officials have repeatedly described serious supply problems among Russian forces, but Monday’s Ukrainian statement could not be independently verified.
Ukrainian soldiers fighting along the front were characterized by slow and costly battles, with heavy losses on both sides.
In a sign that Ukrainians are hungry for good news, social media accounts lit up Sunday night with videos and pictures of a soldier flying a Ukrainian flag on a rooftop. An official in the presidential office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, say on Facebook that it was taken that day in the village of Vysokopillia, about 90 miles south of the Kherson regional capital.
Mr Zelensky appeared to agree with that report in a statement released after a meeting with military leaders on Sunday.
“Ukrainian flags are going back to where they were supposed to be,” the president said.
William J. Broad contribution report.
