Kiev’s attacks on the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant are terrorism, says Duma chairman Volodin
FILE PHOTO: A general view of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, southeastern Ukraine, August 7, 2022 © Russian Defense Ministry via AP
Ukrainian attacks on the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant are creating an unacceptable danger of radiation release, chairman of the State Duma Vyacheslav Volodin said on Tuesday. While the US doesn’t seem to care about the potential damage to Ukraine and its European NATO allies, Moscow will act to prevent this disaster from happening, the speaker of the Russian parliament said.
“Kiev’s terrorist actions are putting the world on the brink of a nuclear catastrophe. We cannot allow this to happen,” Volodin said, opening the legislature’s autumn session.
The US may be far away from the ZNPP, while “their NATO allies in Europe stand to suffer” in case of a radioactive release, Volodin pointed out. The US and EU parliaments are silent about the threat, but many other states around the world share Russia’s concern about the situation, he said.
Russia has controlled Europe’s largest nuclear power plant since March. Attacks on the facility started in July, with the Russian Defense Ministry documenting more than 30 artillery and drone strikes, as well as two attempts by Ukrainian commandos to storm the plant, one during the visit of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) mission earlier this month. Kiev has accused Moscow of staging the shelling to make Ukraine look bad, even though its military eventually admitted to targeting the area.
IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi, who personally led the mission to inspect the plant, said on Monday that both Russia and Ukraine are “interested” in a proposal for a local ceasefire and a security zone around the ZNPP. All of its six reactors are currently offline, due to the ongoing artillery threat.
Moscow has rejected any notion of withdrawing its troops from the area, however, with the Kremlin saying that the only discussion at this time was “about forcing the Ukrainian side to stop the barbaric shelling” of the premises.
In his remarks on Tuesday, Volodin said that “time has once again shown the correctness of the decision” by President Vladimir Putin to send troops into Ukraine in February.
