Washington – Archyde.com
The United States has seen no evidence that Russia attacked the same reactors at a nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine on Thursday, a senior US nuclear energy official said, noting that apparently small arms were used in the fighting.
Jill Harroby, Under Secretary of Energy for Nuclear Energy, told MSNBC that the Biden administration believes it is well prepared for any scenarios related to a radioactive leak from the Zaporizhia nuclear plant, which was the target of the attack.
The Russian Defense Ministry has blamed the attack on the site of the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine on Ukrainian saboteurs, describing it as a brutal provocation.
Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said the nuclear plant was operating normally and the area had been under Russian control since Feb. 28.
He added: “Last night in the vicinity of the power plant, the Kyiv nationalist regime made a brutal attempt at provocation. At regarding two o’clock in the morning during a guard patrol in the vicinity of the nuclear power plant in Zaporizhia, a mobile National Guard patrol was attacked by a Ukrainian sabotage group.”
For its part, Ukraine said that Russian forces attacked the station in the early hours of Friday morning, and that a fire broke out in a five-storey training building adjacent to it, in an incident that drew international condemnation of Moscow on the eighth day of its invasion of Ukraine.