After months of failed attempts to negotiate a deal between Russia and Ukraine, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency is expected to present his case for securing Ukraine’s controversial Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant to the UN Security Council on Tuesday.
It was not immediately clear what exactly the official, Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director general of the IAEA, would present to the Security Council. The purpose of the meeting was “to encourage the parties concerned to adhere to the IAEA’s nuclear safety principles,” Switzerland’s foreign ministry, which currently holds the presidency of the board, said in a statement Monday.
There was a lot at stake leading up to Tuesday’s meeting, but the politics that have so far prevented the agency from reaching a deal were likely to get in the way of the council as well.
Russia and China, which has joined Moscow since last year’s invasion of Ukraine, both have veto power on the council. So are the United States, Britain and France, which are among Kiev’s strongest allies and unlikely to agree to a proposal that Ukraine will not accept.
Fighting around the Zaporizhzhia factory repeatedly damaged it and forced IAEA employees stationed there to take shelter.
The Russian-occupied factory has lost power at least seven times during the war — including just last week — and was forced to rely on emergency diesel generators to keep critical cooling equipment running.
The situation has deteriorated dramatically in recent weeks ahead of an expected Ukrainian counter-offensive, and the fate of the factory has become a frequent subject of information warfare from both sides. On Friday, Ukraine’s military intelligence warned that Russian troops planned to stage a nuclear accident at the plant to give them a chance to regroup. Vladimir Rogov, a Russian occupation official in the region, in turn accused Ukraine of planning to fake the accident to blame Russia.
This month, precarious conditions around the plant also prompted chaotic evacuations from the nearby town of Enerhodar, where many of the plant’s workers live. Gas stations ran out of fuel and hospital equipment was looted in what the city’s exiled mayor Dmytro Orlov described as a “panic.”