Russia resumed shelling near Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, a local official said Wednesday. The bombing continued just one day after the U.N. atomic watchdog agency pressed for the warring sides to carve out a safe zone there to prevent a catastrophe.
Wars at home and abroad seem to make headlines nearly every day. Jesus warns of “wars and rumors of wars” and says that “nation will rise against nation.” Mercifully, He also tells Christians: “See that you are not alarmed.” (Matthew 24:6-7) He is not surprised nor is He unconcerned.
On the Ukrainian front, Russian military fired upon the city of Nikopol, near Europe’s largest nuclear plant, with rockets and heavy artillery.
“There are fires, blackouts, and other things at the [plant] that force us to prepare the local population for the consequences of the nuclear danger,” regional Governor Valentyn Reznichenko says. Officials in recent days have distributed iodine pills to residents to help protect them in the event of a radiation leak.
The fighting going on around the plant has caused international alarm. Rafael Grossi, head of the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), warns that “something very, very catastrophic could take place” at Zaporizhzhia. The IAEA is urging Russia and Ukraine to establish a “nuclear safety and security protection zone” around the plant.
The fear is that the fighting could trigger a calamity on the scale of the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine in 1986.
Neither side would commit to such a zone, citing the need for more details.
The plant is generating electricity only to power its safety systems, a senior Ukrainian official says. Any further disruption of power could force the plant to use back-up diesel generators to keep the reactor cores cool—and prevent them from melting down.
That would entail bringing four diesel trucks each day through the fighting.
“We could potentially be in a situation where we run out of diesel,” says Oleh Korikov, Ukraine’s acting chief inspector for nuclear and radiation safety. “And this can lead to an accident with damage to the active zone of the reactors and, accordingly, the release of radioactive products into the environment.”
Despite the shelling, Ukrainian staff still working at the Russian-occupied plant will try in the coming days to restore the supply of external power through at least one of the seven outside lines.
Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin is defying pressure to halt the war. He insists Moscow will forge ahead in Ukraine until it achieves its goals. He mocks Western attempts to stop Russia with sanctions.
Heavy fighting continues on three fronts: in the north, near the city of Kharkiv; in the east, in the industrial Donbas region; and in the south, in the Kherson region, where Ukraine is trying to retake territory seized by Russia early in the war.
The eastern city of Sloviansk came under Russian fire this morning. A school and an apartment building sustained damage. The strike came at around 4 a.m., says resident Raisa Smelkova, who lives in another part of the building. She and her husband were unhurt. The couple lived through fighting in Ukraine in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea.
Smelkova was sleeping at the time of the explosion. “What is happening now is not just scary, it’s gruesome,” she says. “You would be a fool not to be scared by this.”
The Russian military held large-scale military drills that began last week and ended today. The eastern drills involved forces from China. Some analysts see the exercises as another show of close ties between Moscow and Beijing amid tensions with the West over the war.
(Raisa Smelkova, 75, sits in front of the site where firefighters work to extinguish a fire after a Russian attack that heavily damaged her apartment building in Sloviansk, Ukraine, on Wednesday, September 7, 2022. AP/Leo Correa)
