The war in Ukraine entered a new phase Friday when Russian troops seized Europe’s largest nuclear power plant after a fire in a nearby training building was extinguished. Both sides agreed Russian forces control the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Enerhodar, Ukraine, but both blamed the other for the fire.
Ukrainian authorities said Russian shelling sparked the blaze. At first they said Russian forces were keeping firefighters from reaching the flames but later said the Russians had relented.
According to the Reuters news service, the Kremlin blamed Ukrainian saboteurs and called the fire a “monstrous provocation.”
No increases in radiation levels were detected and plant personnel were monitoring its operations, Ukrainian officials said. Russia’s defense ministry said the plant was operating normally.
In a video address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia of using “nuclear terror.”
“No country has ever shot at nuclear blocks except for Russia,” Zelensky said. “First time ever. For the first time ever in our history, in the history of human kind, the terrorist country has reverted to nuclear terror.”
During earlier televised comments, Russian President Vladimir Putin said operations in Ukraine were going according to plan despite international criticism over the targeting of highly populated residential areas. A senior U.S. defense official said more than 90% of the combat power Russia built up along Ukraine’s borders ahead of its invasion is now committed inside Ukraine.
Also on Thursday, Russia claimed it had taken its first major city, Kherson, and that the country’s forces also surrounded the vital port city of Mariupol, as heavy strikes continued to target Ukraine’s second largest city of Kharkiv as well as an area just outside the capital, Kyiv. In the northern city of Chernihiv, missiles slammed into residential neighborhoods, killing at least 33 people, according to emergency services.
“The use of weapons with wide-area effects in populated urban areas risks being inherently indiscriminate,” U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet said.
The United Nations Human Rights Council said more than a million people have fled Ukraine in the week since the invasion began and a million more are displaced internally.
