DRUZHKIVKA, Ukraine — On Saturday, fighting raged near a sprawling nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine, despite warnings from nuclear safety watchdogs earlier this week that conditions were risky and “getting out of control”.
The Russian army has used the factory in Zaporizhzhya, the largest in Europe, as a base to attack the Ukrainian-controlled city of Nikopol across the river. On Saturday, it fired a salvo of Grad rockets that damaged 11 apartment buildings and 36 private homes. and injured three people, the Ukrainian army said.
The attack also cut off electricity, water and natural gas supplies in the city, where residents have fled the artillery strikes and the associated risk of radiation, the Ukrainian military said.
Russian forces began conducting artillery strikes from the plant about a month ago, and the Ukrainian military has said it cannot fire back over concerns it could hit a reactor at the plant, causing a radiation disaster.
Ukraine has also accused the Russians of causing explosions at the factory intended to upset Europe’s allies over nuclear safety and discourage Ukraine’s armaments.
The Zaporizhzhya factory stands in a dangerous spot on the wide Dnipro River, along the front lines of the war between Russia and Ukraine. The Ukrainian army controls the west bank, while the Russians entrenched themselves around the factory on the east bank of the river.
The fighting near the nuclear power plant came as fighting continued elsewhere in Ukraine, including Russian artillery and tank attacks on the eastern city of Bakhmut, site of some of the fiercest fighting along the front in recent days.
The Ukrainian army continued to attack targets far behind the Russian front lines, hoping to reduce ammunition and fuel supplies. US-supplied HIMARS missiles have helped turn the tide in the war, and on Friday Ukraine hit three command posts and six ammunition depots at various positions behind enemy lines along the front, it said in a statement.
Outrage over nuclear safety violations – Rafael Grossi, the head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog, said on Tuesday that “every principle of nuclear safety has been violated” – has done nothing to expel the Russian military from the site, and the fighting have continued daily, with explosions in the early afternoon on Fridays. Mr Grossi called conditions at the factory “out of control”.
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Mr Grossi said he was much more concerned about Zaporizhzhya than about Chernobyl, the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster, also in Ukraine, which radiated the environment and endangered Europe.
“Chernobyl, I think we’re okay,” said Mr Grossi, noting that his agency had regularly inspected the plant and repaired radiation monitoring sensors and other detection equipment.
But the IAEA has been denied access to important parts of the reactors in Zaporizhzhya because the occupying Russian forces and surrounding shelling make it too dangerous for inspectors. That raises the prospect that if damage is done to the facility, it could be difficult at best to estimate the danger, he added.
In a statement released on Saturday, Ukraine’s state-owned nuclear company, Enerhoatam, said Russian soldiers have occupied basements at the factory and are preventing workers from hiding there, despite the risks of fighting in the area. “People have no shelter and are in danger,” the statement said.
Blocking access to the shelters comes on top of other psychological stress for Ukrainian reactor control room workers and other factory workers, who Ukrainian officials say have been subjected to harsh interrogations, including electric shock torture. The tension poses risks of accidents due to human error, officials said.
Friday’s blast destroyed power lines, forcing Ukrainian workers to cut production at one of the plant’s six reactors. Two others had already been idling and a third was undergoing routine maintenance.
Later in the day, a second series of explosions damaged a building on the site of the plant, according to the Ukrainian state nuclear power company. The company said Russia staged the blast; The Russian army said the attacks came from the Ukrainian side.
In his late-night address to Ukrainians on Friday, President Volodymyr Zelensky highlighted what he called the “brutal crime” of the Russian military using the nuclear power plant as a cover.
“The occupiers once again created an extremely risky situation for everyone in Europe,” said Mr. Zelensky, referring to the explosions at the factory earlier in the day. “This is the largest nuclear power plant on our continent. And any shelling of this facility is an overt, brutal crime, an act of terror.”
An advisor to Mr. Zelensky, Mykhailo Podolyak, expressed the risk even more sharply in a Twitter post on Saturday, suggesting that a disaster could happen any day, spreading radiation across Europe.
“This morning in Europe became possible because the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant miraculously failed to explode yesterday,” he wrote, in shorthand for nuclear power plant. He suggested that the United Nations negotiate a Russian withdrawal from the factory, bringing the site under the control of an independent “special commission.”
Western countries have imposed heavy sanctions on Russia for its war against Ukraine, and Mr. Zelensky called on them to extend those sanctions to Russia’s state-owned nuclear power company, Rosatom. The company has signed contracts with dozens of countries around the world, including China, India, Turkey and Finland, to design and build nuclear power plants
“This is purely a matter of safety,” said Mr. Zelensky. “Whoever creates nuclear threats to other countries is absolutely incapable of using nuclear technologies safely.”
Mr Grossi, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said on Tuesday that the war in Ukraine “threatens one of the world’s largest nuclear energy programs”. notes that there are multiple security violations at the Zaporizhzhia plant and describes the situation as “getting out of control”.
“Doing nothing is unscrupulous,” he said. “If there is an accident at the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, we are not to blame for a natural disaster. We will only have to account for ourselves.”
Basing military equipment at the plant gives Russia a tactical advantage, Ukrainian army commanders and civilian officials say.
Russia has parked an armored personnel carrier and trucks in an engine room of reactor No. 1, according to Dmytro Orlov, the mayor of Enerhodar, the city where the nuclear power plant is located.
Russia places rocket artillery launchers between reactor buildings, Orlov said. Ukrainian military intelligence claimed to have hit one with a drone ammunition in July.
Russia’s use of the site for military purposes is also intended to signal the danger of continuing Western policy to arm Ukraine, Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council said in a statement.
The council’s Center for Combating Disinformation identified the goal as increasing “terror in Europe about the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe and decreasing Western countries’ desire to provide military aid”.
David E. Sanger contributed to the report from Weston, Vt.