War in Ukraine, day 793 | Zelensky commemorates Chernobyl and warns against nuclear risk

(Kyiv) Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned on Friday of the risk of a nuclear incident due to the Russian occupation of the Zaporizhia power plant, a warning on the occasion of the 38^e anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster.

The Russian army has occupied the huge power station in southern Ukraine for more than two years, which previously produced 20% of the country’s electricity.

“It has now been 785 days since Russian terrorists have taken the Zaporizhzhia power plant hostage,” Volodymyr Zelensky lamented on Friday on X.

“It is up to the whole world to put pressure on Russia so that the Zaporizhzhia power plant is liberated and returned to the control of Ukraine,” he insisted, believing that “this is the only way to avoid new disasters” like that of Chernobyl.

On April 26, 1986, when Ukraine was still part of the USSR, a reactor at the Chernobyl power plant, located about a hundred kilometers north of Kyiv, exploded.

The nuclear accident, considered the worst in history, contaminated large areas, especially in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. Much of the rest of Europe also suffered radioactive fallout.

On the first day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, February 24, 2022, troops from Moscow entered the highly radioactive exclusion zone surrounding Chernobyl through Belarus and occupied the site of the no longer operating plant. since 2000.

They stayed there for a month before retreating, ransacking scientific equipment, according to Kyiv.

The Zaporizhia power plant continued to operate during the first months of the Russian invasion, despite its capture by Russian forces and periods of bombing, before being shut down in the fall of 2022.

Kyiv and Moscow have repeatedly accused each other of having bombed the site, these strikes raising the specter of a “new Chernobyl”.

Russia hits rail to block military deliveries

Russia has intensified its strikes on the Ukrainian railway network to “paralyze” military supplies, particularly Western equipment, with a view to a new offensive, a senior Ukrainian security official told AFP on Friday.

The railway infrastructure is particularly vital in Ukraine, both for passenger transport and commerce as well as for the army, because since the start of the Russian invasion in February 2022, all civilian air traffic has been paralyzed there.

“These are classic measures before an offensive” of scale, expected in the coming weeks, declared on condition of anonymity a highly placed Source in the Ukrainian security system questioned by AFP about these attacks.

The goal “is to paralyze deliveries, the transport of military cargo,” she added.

The railway network has been regularly targeted by Russian bombings over the past two years. Strikes notably hit stations like that of Kramatorsk, in the east, where dozens of people, mainly civilians trying to flee the fighting, were killed in April 2022.

But in recent weeks, an increase in bombings targeting railway infrastructure has been noted.

Western weapons targeted

On Thursday alone, strikes hit these infrastructures in three Ukrainian regions.

In Donetsk (East), divided by the front line, three employees of the railway company, Ukrzaliznytsia, were killed in an attack on a railway site.

The same day, ten civilians were injured in a missile strike against the Balaklia station, in the Kharkiv region (North-East), and railway infrastructure was damaged in Smila (Cherkassy region, center).

A massive bombing against railway sites in Dnipro and its region (Central-East) killed an Ukrzaliznytsia employee and injured seven others on April 19. A week earlier, the Sumy station (North) was hit by a strike.

The Russian army, for its part, claimed on Friday to have struck a “train with Western weapons and military equipment” in the town of Udatchne, in the Donetsk region, as well as military “troops and equipment” in Balaklia.

Although she did not give dates, these assertions seem to correspond to the strikes mentioned the day before by the Ukrainian authorities.

Since March, Russia has increased strikes targeting Ukrainian infrastructure, particularly on energy sites, many of which it destroyed, and more recently on the railway network.

These attacks on the railways also come at a time when the United States has, after months of paralysis due to internal political rivalries, resumed its military aid to Ukraine.

Hospitals evacuated

Western weapons given to Ukraine, including ammunition for artillery and air defense, are delivered in great secrecy from neighboring countries, particularly Poland.

Ukrzaliznytsia’s head of passenger transport, Oleksandr Pertsovsky, told AFP on Thursday that he had noted “an increase in attacks on railway infrastructure”.

“We see that the strikes target railway logistics, and mainly affect civilian sites,” he said. “They carry out indiscriminate strikes on train stations, it’s a very primitive way of doing things.”

Weakened by an unsuccessful counter-offensive in the summer of 2023 and the months-long paralysis of American military aid, the Ukrainian forces, lacking men and ammunition, are under pressure on a large part of the front, particularly in ballast.

And the situation is expected to get worse around mid-May and early June, which will be a “difficult period,” warned the head of Ukrainian military intelligence Kyrylo Budanov on Monday.

An analysis shared by Western officials who predict that the next three months will be “very difficult” for Kyiv’s forces.

Russian artillery fire also left two people dead on Friday in the Sumy region, in northern Ukraine on the Russian border, according to the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, which specifies that it was two elderly women who were been killed.

Three more people died following Ukrainian strikes in two Russian regions, Kursk and Bryansk, as well as in Ukraine’s Luhansk region, almost entirely occupied by Russia, Russian authorities said.

Finally, Kyiv City Hall announced the evacuation of two hospitals, including one pediatric, in the Ukrainian capital, fearing that Russia would strike them, because a video circulating on online media claims that soldiers would be in these establishments.

This “de facto announces a strike”, estimated the town hall, which insists on the fact that these hospital centers are not military sites.