As following the previous bombardments on Friday on these installations located in southern Ukraine and which fell into the hands of Russian soldiers in early March, the two belligerents accused each other on Sunday of having attacked them.
The occupation authorities of the town of Energodar, where the Zaporizhia power station is located, thus affirmed that the Ukrainian army had fired during the night from Saturday to Sunday a cluster bomb with a “multiple rocket launcher Hurricane”.
“The shrapnel and rocket engine fell 400 meters from a working reactor,” they continued, adding that the strike had “damaged” administrative buildings and hit “a spent nuclear fuel storage area.” .
At the same time, the Ukrainian state company Energoatom announced that one of the employees on site had to be hospitalized for “wounds caused by the explosion” of one of the rockets fired “Saturday evening” by the Russians.
“Three radiation monitoring detectors around the plant site have been damaged (…). Consequently, it is currently impossible to detect” a possible increase in radioactivity and therefore to “intervene in good time”, a she added.
“Suicidal Thing”
“There is not a single nation in the world that can feel safe when a terrorist state bombs a nuclear power plant,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reacted in his daily video.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Saturday deemed “more and more alarming” the information from the Zaporizhia power plant, one of whose reactors had to be shut down following the attack the day before.
The Ukrainian authorities had accused the Russians of carrying out three strikes on this site on Friday. Moscow had for its part assured that Ukrainian shells had hit it.
When the plant was taken over, the Russian military had opened fire on buildings, at the risk of a major nuclear accident.
“Any attack on nuclear power plants is a suicidal thing,” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said Monday morning in Tokyo. “I hope that these attacks will end. At the same time, I hope that the IAEA will be able to access the plant” in Zaporijjia.
As part of the regular rotations to supply the agricultural markets started this week, under agreements recently signed in Istanbul by the belligerents, four additional ships loaded with cereals left southern Ukraine on Sunday.
This convoy, the second since Friday, “has just left the ports of Odessa and Chornomorsk”, with “regarding 170,000 tonnes of goods related to agriculture”, said the Ukrainian Ministry of Infrastructure.
The blockage of millions of tonnes of cereals due to the war has caused food prices to soar in the poorest countries and raised fears of a global food crisis.
At least five civilians killed in the east
From eastern to southern Ukraine, military operations continued over the weekend.
Russian attacks have killed at least five civilians in the eastern region of Donetsk, said its governor Pavlo Kirilenko.
In this same province, near Virnopillia, “the occupiers attempted to carry out an assault”, but were “repelled”; they also “retreat” near Sloviansk, Bakhmout, Avdiïvka and several other localities, announced Sunday evening the staff of the Ukrainian army.
The Russians also “bombarded two districts of Kharkiv”, in the northeast, destroying “industrial infrastructure” there, as well as, not far from there, the areas of Bogodukhiv, Izium and Chugouïv, reported Oleg Sinegoubov, governor of the Kharkiv region.
“Two people were hospitalized, a 16-year-old boy and an 83-year-old man. Both were landmine victims,” he said.
Two others were injured in strikes on Marganets in central Ukraine, said Valentin Reznitchenko, governor of Dnipro province.
“We still have a very difficult situation in the Donbass (east), in the Kharkiv region and in the south, where the occupiers are trying to concentrate their forces,” acknowledged President Zelensky.
He took the opportunity to warn the Russians once morest the organization of “referendums” in the occupied territories in the south of his country with a view to their annexation, warning them that if they persist in this way, “they will close themselves to them -even any possibility of negotiations with Ukraine and the free world, which they will certainly need at some point”.
The same day, the NGO Amnesty International said it regretted the “anger” triggered in kyiv by one of its reports in which it accused the Ukrainian soldiers of endangering civilians, but it once once more maintained its conclusions.
The Kremlin, for its part, welcomed a small “victory”: the re-election of former Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkadi Dvorkovitch as head of the International Chess Federation (FIDE), following a ballot in the context of the conflict in Ukraine.
Another symbolic image, that of American actress Jessica Chastain in kyiv, where she met Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday, who thanked her for her “support”.