Ukraine and Russia again accused each other on Wednesday of bombing the surroundings of the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant (south), to which a team from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was on its way.
The IAEA mission arrived in the early afternoon in the town of Zaporijjia, some 120 kilometers from the plant, AFP journalists noted.
“The Russian army is bombing Energodar,” said Yevguen Yevtouchenko, head of the administration of Nikopol, located opposite Energodar, on the other side of the Dnieper River, on Telegram. “The situation is dangerous with these provocations,” he added.
Dmytro Orlov, pro-kyiv mayor of Energodar, currently exiled, for his part published on Telegram images of the town hall of the city with the damaged facade. The building is several kilometers from the nuclear power plant.
Mr Yevtushenko claimed that the Russians, who control Energodar and the plant, bombed the city to blame it on the Ukrainian forces, and to give the IAEA mission the impression that it was kyiv that bombed the around the power plant.
Ukrainian authorities also accuse Russia of deliberately bombing the area to prevent the IAEA team from achieving this.
In Moscow, the Russian Defense Ministry again accused Ukrainian forces on Wednesday of “provocations” aimed at “disrupting the work of the IAEA mission”, claiming that one of the Ukrainian artillery bombardments had “hit” on Tuesday “a radioactive waste reprocessing building” of the complex.
kyiv and Moscow have been accusing each other for weeks of endangering the safety of the plant and risking a nuclear accident. Moscow denies any strike, explaining in particular that it has no interest in bombing an area that its troops control.
IAEA director Rafael Grossi left kyiv for Zaporizhia in the morning, after congratulating the press on finally being able “after several months of effort” to inspect the plant, including inside .
The plant, the largest in Europe, has been occupied by the Russian army since the beginning of March, after the invasion of Ukraine launched on February 24. kyiv has accused Moscow of deploying hundreds of troops there and stockpiling ammunition there.
“The IAEA is ready. We will report back after our mission. We are going to spend a few days there,” added the head of the UN agency, who leads a team of 13 people.
The Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, received on Tuesday the IAEA experts, who arrived in kyiv on Monday, repeating on this occasion that the international community must obtain from Russia “an immediate demilitarization” of the plant and the departure of the site “from all the Russian soldiers with all their explosives, all their weapons”.
“Unfortunately Russia does not stop its provocations and maintains by its actions” the risk of a nuclear catastrophe “, he affirmed. »
The Zaporijjia power station, one of the four nuclear power stations operating in Ukraine, has six reactors with a capacity of 1,000 megawatts each.
Last week, it was briefly disconnected from the power grid for the first time in its history, after power lines were damaged.
gas war
On the ground, “fighting is currently taking place practically on the entire front line: in the south, in the Kharkiv region (northeast) and in the Donbass (east),” President Zelensky said on Tuesday evening.
On Wednesday morning, the Ukrainian authorities notably reported four deaths in the Donetsk region (east), one of the two provinces of the Donbass basin, partly controlled by pro-Russian forces since 2014, and whose total conquest is the Moscow’s strategic priority.
In this region, “fierce fighting continues in the direction of Bakhmout and Avdiivka”, where “the Russians tried unsuccessfully to advance” but had to “retreat”, they added.
They also reported at least one death in Mykolaiv, in the south, where two dead and 24 injured had already been reported the day before.
In this region, the Ukrainian army is continuing its counter-offensives, particularly around Kherson, one of the few major Ukrainian cities conquered by Moscow since the launch of its invasion on February 24.
The Russian Ministry of Defense for its part assured Wednesday that its forces had repelled the Ukrainian offensives in the past two days, inflicting heavy losses on the enemy with in particular “8 helicopters” and “63 tanks” destroyed and “1,700 men” you are.
This information was unverifiable from independent sources.
The Ukrainian presidency on Tuesday reported “powerful explosions” in the Kherson region as well as the destruction of “a number of Russian ammunition depots” and “all major bridges” that allow vehicles to cross the Dnieper , the river watering this part of Ukraine. And this in order to cut off supplies from Crimea.
Russia assured on Monday that it had repelled Ukrainian “offensive attempts” in the Kherson region as well as in that of Mykolaiv, further west.
On Tuesday, the authorities of Kharkiv (north-east), the second city of Ukraine, announced the death of at least five people in Russian strikes.
In another parallel war, that of gas, the Russian giant Gazprom announced on Wednesday that it had “entirely” suspended its gas deliveries to Europe via the Nord Stream gas pipeline due to maintenance work expected to last three days.