Russian Attacks Cut Off Esential Power to Nuclear Statitons in Ukraine

There are growing fears that Russia’s relentless targeting of Ukraine’s electricity grid will threaten the safety of the country’s nuclear power plants, in the wake of an unprecedented emergency shutdown on Wednesday.

Petro Kotin, the president of Ukraine’s nuclear power company, Energoatom, said that all safety mechanisms had worked as intended on Wednesday, but two generators were damaged in the process, delaying the restart of two reactors. Kotin said repeated shutdowns caused by more Russian missile attacks could cause extensive damage, with a potentially severe impact on Ukraine’s power supply and possibly on nuclear safety.

Russia kept up its onslaught on Ukrainian cities on Saturday with an attack on a residential area in the city of Dnipro which injured six people and destroyed seven houses, according to the governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region, Valentyn Reznichenko.

The Ministry of Defence in the UK said Russia had resorted to removing the nuclear warheads from cruise missiles and launching them with just ballast in their nosecones, with the aim of diverting Ukraine’s air defences and doing some damage just from the sheer force of their impact on targets. “Whatever Russia’s intent, this improvisation highlights the level of depletion in Russia’s stock of long-range missiles,” the ministry said in one of its daily assessments of the invasion. Ukrainian intelligence believes Russia could carry out another mass missile attack on infrastructure in the middle of this week.

The Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, Europe’s largest, was seized by Russian forces in March and it has been off the grid since September, amid frequent shelling of the area around it.

Ukraine’s three other nuclear power plants – Rivne, South Ukraine and Khmelnytskyi – have not been directly targeted in recent Russian missile strikes, but their safety could be threatened by further attacks on the Ukrainian power grid.

Missile attacks last Wednesday on high voltage cables, transformers and substations triggered the first ever simultaneous emergency shutdown, or “scram”, of all four plants.