The Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), the largest such facility in Europe, has caught fire after being shelled by Ukrainian forces, the governor of Russia’s Zaporozhye Region, Evgeny Balitsky, announced on Sunday. The blaze is under control, the official added.
The fire, which affected the plant’s cooling systems, broke out following a Ukrainian attack on the nearby city of Energodar on Sunday, Balitsky said in a statement. The plant’s six reactors were placed in a state of “cold shutdown” as a precaution, the governor explained, adding that there is “no threat of a steam explosion or other consequences.”
“Emergency workers are working at the scene of the fire, and the sources of ignition have begun being eliminated,” Balitsky said.
According to the governor, radiation levels around the plant are normal and “there is no threat” to people nearby.
The Zaporozhye NPP was seized by Russian forces in 2022, four days into Moscow’s military operation. Six months later, the region of Zaporozhye voted to join the Russian Federation in a referendum. Throughout the first year of the conflict, Russian forces foiled repeated Ukrainian attempts to attack the station – which sits on the Dnieper River – with landing craft and drones.
Kamikaze drones were used in Sunday’s attack, the facility’s communications director, Evgeniya Yashina, said in a statement. According to Yashina, the attack marked the first time that Ukrainian forces were able to seriously damage the plant’s infrastructure.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova condemned the shelling of the plant as a “terrorist” act and called on the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to perform “at least some imitation of work” to ensure the plant’s security.
“The terrorists in Kiev, under the leadership of the collective West, destroyed their country, ruined the people of Ukraine, undermined global energy and food security, and now they have begun the nuclear terror of the continent,” she said.
The IAEA maintains an observer mission at the ZNPP and has condemned the repeated strikes against the plant. However, the UN agency refuses to attribute blame for these attacks, claiming that it does not have “indisputable evidence” of Kiev’s culpability. In a presentation to the UN General Assembly last month, Russia’s deputy representative to the organization, Dmitry Polyansky, displayed wreckage of a Ukrainian drone that hit the facility, accusing Kiev of posing “the only real threat to nuclear facilities in Ukraine today.”