Russia is planning attacks on Ukrainian nuclear power plants, Zelensky warns

CNN
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Russia plans to attack Ukrainian nuclear power plants and cut them off from the power grid, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Wednesday, warning that such attacks risk a nuclear catastrophe.

“Radiation knows no national borders,” Zelensky said in his address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Wednesday.

Since Russia “cannot defeat the resistance of our people on the battlefield,” Zelensky said, Russian President Vladimir Putin is “looking for other ways to break the Ukrainian spirit.”

In its third winter, Russia is stepping up attacks on Ukraine's energy grid to plunge the country into “darkness and cold,” Zelensky said.

Zelensky's address to the United Nations came just before he is set to discuss his “victory plan” with US President Joe Biden, which is expected to include Kiev's long-held demand to use long-range missiles to attack military targets in Russia.

In his speech, Zelensky recalled the “terrible” moment in the first weeks of the war, when Russian attacks on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant (ZNPP), the largest in Europe, raised Ukrainians' fears of another Chernobyl-style disaster.

“No one could have known how the Russian attacks on the nuclear facility would end, and everyone in Ukraine was reminded of what Chernobyl means,” he said.

Two and a half years later, Zelensky warned that the Russian-occupied nuclear power plant remained “at risk of a nuclear incident.” Russia and Ukraine have blamed each other for previous incidents at the plant. According to the World Nuclear Association, Ukraine has three other nuclear power plants.

CNN has previously reported that the risk of a large-scale nuclear incident at the nuclear plant was low as Ukrainian operators placed the plant's reactors into a “cold shutdown” mode in June 2023.

If the plant's reactors were blown up, the cold reactor would “expose spent fuel to the air, spreading some radiation,” William Alberque, director of strategy, technology and arms control at the International Institute for Strategy Studies, told CNN.

This would create a radiation zone where “there is a higher risk of cancer over the next 40 years,” but would not cause the kind of destruction seen after the meltdown of the active Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986.

While the risk of a large-scale nuclear incident is low, the threat to Ukraine's energy system remains high.

“Russia has destroyed all of our thermal power plants and a large part of our hydroelectric capacity,” Zelensky said. He said 80% of Ukraine's energy system had been crippled by Russia's attacks.

However, missing from Zelensky's speech was any reference to Ukraine's hopes of gaining permission to use Western weapons to attack targets deep inside Russia.

Before his trip to the US, Zelensky told CNN that Ukraine's request was an essential part of his “victory plan.”

Radek Sikorski, Poland's foreign minister, told CNN it was crucial that Ukraine's request was approved. He recalled a recent incident in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv in which an entire family was wiped out by a Russian missile attack.

“The missile that killed this family was fired from a Russian bomber flying over Russian territory from a Russian airfield. Give me one reason why Ukraine shouldn’t be able to shoot down this bomber and this airfield,” Sikorski said.

“The victim of aggression has the right to defend himself even on the territory of the aggressor,” he added, saying: “We bring these arguments to the United States.”