By Tom Balmforth
LONDON, April 22 (Reuters) – Russia has repeatedly launched drones and missiles on a flight path near the disused Chornobyl nuclear plant during attacks on Ukraine, elevating the risk of a major accident, Ukraine’s top state prosecutor told Reuters.
Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko detailed the previously unreported Russian military activity near Ukrainian nuclear sites in written remarks, as Ukraine prepares to mark Sunday’s 40th anniversary of the 1986 Chornobyl disaster.
Apart from the decommissioned Chornobyl power station, Ukraine has four nuclear power plants, including Europe’s largest, which lies in the southern Zaporizhzhia region and has been occupied by Russian forces since soon after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Both the Chornobyl site and western Ukraine’s two-reactor Khmelnytskyi nuclear plant have been on the flight path of Russian hypersonic Kinzhal missiles since the invasion, Kravchenko said.
Thirty-five Kinzhals have been detected at various distances within around 20 km (12 miles) of the Chornobyl facility or the Khmelnytskyi plant, he said. Of those, 18 passed within around 20 km of both sites on the same flight, he added.
“Such launches cannot be explained by any military considerations. It is evident that the flights over the nuclear facilities are carried out solely for the purpose of intimidation and terror,” he said.
Russia’s defence ministry did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
The International Atomic Energy Agency watchdog said it frequently reported about military activity in the vicinity of nuclear power plants and attacks on electrical substations that are key to nuclear safety.
“IAEA Director General (Rafael) Grossi has repeatedly expressed deep concern about the risks and dangers of these military activities for nuclear safety and security,” it said.
“The DG has also repeatedly called for maximum restraint near nuclear facilities to avoid the danger of a nuclear accident.”
MISSILES GROUNDED
The Kinzhal is an air-launched hypersonic missile that can carry a warhead of 500 kilograms and has been championed by Russian President Vladimir Putin. When travelling at 6,500 km per hour, it covers 5 km in a few seconds.
In three separate cases, Kravchenko said that Kinzhal missiles had fallen to the ground during their flights and landed within around 10 km of the Khmelnytskyi nuclear power plant.
It was not clear why the missiles came down, but Kravchenko said the wreckage bore no indications that they had been intercepted.
An explosion at Chornobyl sent radiation across Europe in 1986 and prompted Soviet authorities to mobilise vast numbers of personnel and equipment to deal with the aftermath of the accident. The plant’s last working reactor was closed in 2000.
Russia occupied the Chornobyl plant for more than a month in the first weeks of its invasion as its forces initially tried to advance on the capital Kyiv, before withdrawing.
Since July 2024, when Russia began heavy drone attacks on Ukraine, Kravchenko said radars had detected at least 92 Russian drones that flew within a five-km radius of the Chornobyl plant’s radiation shield.
The containment shield was installed to prevent radiation leaking from Reactor No. 4, which exploded on April 26, 1986, causing a huge fire.
The actual number of fly-bys, Kravchenko said, was almost certainly much higher than 92, because the tracks visible on Ukraine’s military radars can denote more than one drone and sometimes drones do not show up at all.
“Deliberate flights of (drones) with a powerful warhead over a nuclear facility are at least extremely irresponsible and indicate a complete disregard … for the safety of civilians not only in Ukraine, but throughout Europe,” he said.
‘IRREVERSIBLE CORROSION’
In February last year, an object identified by Ukraine as a long-range Russian attack drone struck the Chornobyl facility, piercing the radiation containment shield.
The Kremlin denied Russian involvement at the time, saying its forces do not target nuclear infrastructure and that Ukraine had probably carried out the attack itself as a “provocation”.
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has estimated it will cost at least 500 million euros ($588 million) to repair the damage and that without such work “irreversible corrosion” of the structure will begin in four years.
An investigation conducted by Ukrainian state prosecutors assessed that the Russian attack was probably deliberate, Kravchenko said.
The assessment, he said, was based on the steep angle at which they determined the drone struck the containment shield. In their terminal phase, one-way attack drones carrying explosives typically dive towards their target and accelerate until impact.
Kravchenko said the Russian military was likely using Chornobyl as an attack route for drones to try to bypass dense areas of Ukrainian air defence coverage.
Ukraine, which has limited air defences to protect a land mass twice the size of Italy, concentrates them near populated areas and important infrastructure to maximise their utility against Russian attacks.
The Chornobyl facility, which lies less than 10 km from the border with Belarus and around 100 km from Kyiv, is surrounded by an exclusion zone of contaminated wilderness.
($1 = 0.8503 euros)
(Additional reporting by Olena Harmash in Kyiv and Francois Murphy in Vienna; editing by Mike Collett-White and Timothy Heritage)
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