International experts have arrived in southeastern Ukraine to check the safety of Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant after it was damaged by shelling, as Kyiv’s forces continued to target Russian troops, supply lines and transport routes in occupied territory.
A team of 14 inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) arrived on Wednesday afternoon in Zaporizhzhia, the closest Kyiv-held city to the nuclear power station in the nearby town of Enerhodar, which is occupied by Russian forces.
However, it is not clear when Russian forces will allow the inspectors to visit the site, how long they will be allowed to stay or what they will be permitted to do, as Moscow and Kyiv continue to blame each other for shelling around the facility and the Kremlin rejects calls to remove its soldiers, armoured vehicles and weapons from the plant.
“We have a very important task there to perform – to assess the real situations there, to help stabilise the situation as much as we can,” said IAEA director general Rafael Grossi, who is leading the mission.
He said a priority of the visit is to check on the welfare of the Ukrainian technicians who have continued to run the six-reactor facility since it was seized by Russia’s military shortly after its all-out invasion of Ukraine in late February.
“The mission will take a few days, and if we are able to establish a permanent presence or a continued presence … then it’s going to be prolonged. But this first segment, so to speak, is going to take a few days,” Mr Grossi added.
Mikhail Ulyanov, Russia’s envoy to the IAEA, said his country “welcomes” the prospect of the agency’s specialists establishing a permanent presence at the plant, but Moscow-appointed officials in occupied parts of Zaporizhzhia region seemed less supportive of the mission.
Yevgeny Balitsky said the inspectors would have to “review the plant’s operations in one day” and wait in line at checkpoints to enter Russian-occupied territory.
Moscow had earlier insisted that any IAEA mission travel to the plant through Russia, and Vladimir Rogov, another collaborationist official in occupied Zaporizhzhia region, said: “They won’t be given a special pass. They could have safely, quickly and without obstacles got there from Russia” via what he described as “liberated territory”.
Mr Rogov also claimed on Wednesday that a group of Ukrainian “saboteurs” had been caught planning a “terrorist attack” on the nuclear plant, which he said was intended to show ‘that the situation is out of control and that Russia cannot ensure safety” at the site, where only two of six reactors are now thought to be generating power.
Kyiv and Moscow accuse each other of firing shells that have damaged power lines and radiation detectors at the plant, and of escalating firing close to the facility to hamper the IAEA visit.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy told Mr Grossi that “there are risks of incidents at the plant, failure of nuclear reactors and disconnection … from our grid. There are Russian weapons at the plant. That is why it is a global threat… Current risks can be eliminated only by demilitarising the plant.”
Ukraine continued a counteroffensive in the southern Kherson region, where the military said it was focusing artillery strikes on Russian command posts, arms and fuel depots and key transport routes – particularly bridges across the Dnieper river – to disrupt enemy attempts to send reinforcements to the area.
Meanwhile, Russia halted gas flow to Europe through its Nord Stream 1 pipeline for what it called 72 hours of maintenance, having earlier stopped or reduced energy supplies to several EU states following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which has killed thousands of civilians and displaced millions.
