Ukraine says drone hits nuclear fuel facility near Chernobyl | Today’s news
Ukraine said Moscow’s forces hit a nuclear fuel depot near the preserved Chernobyl power plant north of Kiev, an incident that prompted a sharp response from the United Nations atomic watchdog.
Ukraine’s General Staff said a Russian Shahed drone hit a building that is part of the central spent fuel storage facility in Chernobyl’s exclusion zone. The small fire was extinguished within an hour, the General Staff said on Telegram.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said it had been informed of the attack and its team would soon visit the facility to inspect the damage.
The facility is used for long-term storage of spent nuclear fuel from operating Ukrainian nuclear power plants.
“The impact caused significant damage to the facility’s fuel intake building – including the facade, windows and doors – – and surrounding buildings were also hit by the blast wave,” the UN nuclear watchdog said. The level of radiation at the facility remains within established limits, according to Ukraine.
Ukraine’s foreign ministry and energy ministry are “already working to ensure that each of our partners knows what happened,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told X, calling the strike “extremely disgusting.”
“There is no data yet that exceeds normal background radiation levels. But Russia’s brazenness has definitely increased,” Zelenskyy said.
Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the IAEA, said the incident was “deeply disturbing because it took place in a facility containing a large amount of nuclear material that is in storage just a few meters from the attacked building”.
The Chernobyl incident comes a week after Moscow claimed that a Ukrainian drone struck the defunct Zaporizhia nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine, which Russian forces have controlled since the first weeks of the war.
The IAEA also inspected the Zaporizhia site after the strike and confirmed that it was a drone attack. The southern Ukrainian military command denied any strikes against the facility.
This article was generated from an automated news agency source without text modification.
