The head of Ukraine’s state nuclear energy company said on Sunday there were indications that Russian forces could be preparing to leave the massive Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, which they seized in March, shortly after the invasion began.
Such a move would mark a major battlefield shift in the partially occupied Zaporizhia region in the southeast of the country, where the front line has seen little change for months. Frequent bombings in its vicinity have long raised fears of a nuclear catastrophe.
“In recent weeks we’ve actually been receiving information that indications have appeared that they may be in the process of leaving (the station),” Petro Kotin, head of Ukraine’s Energoatom company, told national television.
“In principle, there are too many reports in the Russian media that it is worth evacuating (the plant) and possibly transferring control (to the International Atomic Energy Agency)” of the United Nations, he added. “There is the impression that they are packing up and stealing whatever they can,” she continued.
Russia and Ukraine, witnesses of the worst nuclear accident in the world at Chernobyl in 1986, have been exchanging accusations for months of having bombed the Zaporizhya power plant complex, which no longer generates energy.
Asked if it was too early to talk about the Russian forces leaving the station, Cotten told television, “It’s too early. We don’t expect it to happen now, but they are preparing (to leave).”
And the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency met with a Russian delegation in Istanbul on November 23 to discuss the establishment of a protection zone around the plant, the largest in Europe, to prevent a nuclear disaster. Zaporizhia supplied about 20% of Ukraine’s electricity.
The RIA news agency quoted Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, the day after the meeting, as saying the decision on the protection zone should be made “very quickly”.
