The United States on Thursday called on Russia to cease all military operations in and around nuclear power plants in Ukraine and said it supports kyiv’s call for a “demilitarized zone” in Zaporizhia, again bombed.
“Fighting near a nuclear power plant is dangerous and irresponsible,” a State Department spokesperson said, adding that “the United States continues to call on Russia to cease all military operations in and around nuclear power plants. nuclear power plants and return full control to Ukraine, and support Ukrainian calls for a demilitarized zone in and around the nuclear power plant”.
The bombardments continued overnight from Wednesday to Thursday on the front line in Ukraine, including not far from the Zaporijjia nuclear power plant which will be on the menu for a meeting of the UN Security Council during the day.
In Nikopol, in the south-east of the country, about 100 kilometers from the Zaporizhia power station, which is on the other side of the Dnieper river, Governor Valentyn Reznichenko reported three dead and nine injured in bombardments night Russians with Grad multiple rocket launchers.
In the east, in the Donbass mining basin, the head of the military administration of the Donetsk region, Pavlo Kyrylenko, announced on Telegram Thursday morning that 11 civilians had been killed in the past 24 hours.
Russian forces relentlessly shell the town of Soledar, an industrial city of 11,000 inhabitants before the war, and attempt to drive the Ukrainian army out of it in order to advance towards the larger neighboring town of Bakhmout.
Since Russian troops ended their offensive on kyiv at the end of March and withdrew from around the capital, the Kremlin has made Donbass, partly controlled since 2014 by pro-Russian separatists, its main objective.
The real Russian advance was very slow and the war turned into an artillery duel between two entrenched armies around a few localities.
“Targeted Genocide”
At the same time, in Latvia, the parliament on Wednesday adopted a declaration qualifying Russia as a “State sponsor of terrorism” and “Russian violence against Ukrainian civilians” as “targeted genocide”.
The head of Ukrainian diplomacy, Dmytro Kouleba, said he was “grateful” to the Latvian Parliament on Thursday on Twitter, saying that the declaration came “at the right time”. He called on “other countries and organizations” to follow this approach.
A meeting convened Thursday afternoon at the UN at the request of Russia will examine the security situation of the nuclear site of Zaporijjia, the largest in Europe, which worries the international community.
Moscow and kyiv accuse each other of having bombed the plant last week, without it being possible to verify these statements from independent sources.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said its director general, Rafael Grossi, would brief the UN Security Council “on the nuclear safety and security situation” at the plant, as well as of its “efforts to agree on an IAEA expert mission to the site as soon as possible”.
The IAEA said its report would detail how the bombings at the site last week “violated virtually all seven indispensable pillars of nuclear safety and security”.
“Russia is now a terrorist state and is holding the nuclear power plant hostage, blackmailing the nuclear disaster,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Thursday in an address to a donors’ conference in Copenhagen.
“Russia can cause the greatest radioactive emergency in history at the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant. And the aftermath may be even worse than (the accident in 1986) Chernobyl,” he added.
On Wednesday, the group of seven most industrialized countries (G7) had demanded that “Russia immediately return to its legitimate sovereign owner, Ukraine, full control of the plant”, accusing Moscow of putting “the region in danger”.
On Tuesday evening, the Ukrainian operator Energoatom claimed that Russian forces were preparing to connect the plant to Crimea, a peninsula in southern Ukraine annexed by Moscow in 2014, and were damaging it by carrying out this reorientation of the electricity generation.
“Technical accidents”
In Belarus, the army on Thursday denied reports of explosions that allegedly occurred overnight near a military airfield in the Gomel region in the southeast of the country, near the border with Ukraine. The Ministry of Defense assured that the incident was due to a vehicle having “caught on fire”.
In Crimea, powerful explosions devastated an ammunition depot on a Russian military airfield on Tuesday, killing at least one person and injuring several others and causing panic among the thousands of Russian tourists on vacation in the peninsula. The Russian army claimed that no shooting or bombardment had been the cause of these explosions.
For its part, kyiv has not admitted its responsibility in either incident, but an adviser to the presidency, Mikhaïlo Podoliak, wrote on Twitter: “the epidemic of technical accidents at air bases in Crimea and in Belarus should be seen by the Russian military as a warning: forget Ukraine, take off your uniform and go. Neither in occupied Crimea nor in occupied Belarus will you be safe. Karma finds you everywhere”.
On the financial level, Ukraine has obtained from its international creditors a two-year moratorium on its foreign debt, estimated at 20 billion dollars, announced its Prime Minister Denys Chmygal.
The Ukrainian economy has collapsed since the start of the Russian invasion launched on February 24, and could see its GDP plunge by 45% this year, according to the latest estimates from the World Bank.