Ukraine’s foreign minister said yesterday that Russia was planning strikes on Ukrainian nuclear facilities before the winter, and urged the IAEA and Ukraine’s allies to establish permanent monitoring missions at the country’s nuclear plants.
“According to Ukrainian intelligence, Kremlin is preparing strikes on Ukrainian nuclear energy critical objects ahead of winter,” Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha wrote on X.
“In particular, it concerns open distribution devices at (nuclear power plants and) transmission substations, critical for the safe operation of nuclear energy.” Sybiha did not elaborate on why Kyiv believed such strikes were being prepared. There was no immediate comment from Moscow.
Russia has been waging an aerial bombardment campaign on Ukraine’s power grid since autumn 2022 after invading the country earlier that year. It has damaged or destroyed most of Ukraine’s thermal power generating capacity and has sometimes hit dams, but has not yet struck any Ukrainian-controlled nuclear facilities.
Ukraine has previously accused Russia of nuclear blackmail after Russian forces occupied the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, in March 2022, early on in the invasion. Moscow denies that allegation.
Also yesterday, Ukraine said it had hit two Russian munition depots overnight.
Russian officials acknowledged the Ukrainian attack on one of the depots in southern Krasnodar region, saying it was carried out with drones. They introduced local emergency measures to mitigate the effects of the assault. A statement by Ukraine’s military general staff said the munitions depots were at Tikhoretsk in Krasnodar region and Oktyabrsky in the western region of Tver.
“The (Tikhoretsk) facility is in the top three largest munitions storages of the occupiers, and is one of the key points in the Russian military logistical system,” the general staff wrote in a statement on Telegram.
It said Ukraine had information that a train carrying 2,000 tonnes of munitions, including from North Korea, had been on the territory of the depot at the time of the strike. Reuters was unable to verify the report independently.
Meanwhile, Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Russia will take no part in any follow-up to the Swiss-organised ‘peace summit’ held in June as the process amounts to ‘fraud’. “This process itself has nothing to do with a settlement,” Zakharova wrote on the Telegram messaging app. “It is another manifestation of fraud by the Anglo-Saxons and their Ukrainian puppets.”
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