The UN Secretary-General on Thursday warned that any damage to Ukraine’s Zaporizhia nuclear power plant would be a “suicide,” while Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he feared a “new Chernobyl” during a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Lviv . .
• Also read: Russia: A burning ammunition depot near the Ukrainian border
• Also read: Mines will kill civilians for decades
• Also read: No peace with Russia before troop withdrawal
“We have to say things as they are: any potential harm to Zaporijjia would be suicide,” said Antonio Guterres, again calling for the “demilitarization” of the plant occupied by the Russian army.
Mr Guterres said he was “seriously concerned” about the situation at Europe’s largest nuclear power plant and called for it “not to be used for any military operation”.
Mr Guterres continued his visit on Friday to Odessa, a Ukrainian port crucial for resuming grain exports blocked by the war.
For his part, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reiterated Turkey’s support for Ukraine and expressed alarm at the risk of a “new Chernobyl” in light of the world’s largest civilian nuclear accident.
Reactor number 4 of the Chernobyl power plant had exploded on April 26, 1986, releasing a radioactive cloud that spread across Europe.
“While we continue our efforts to find a solution, we have been and continue to be on the side of our Ukrainian friends,” Mr Erdogan said, before adding that he did not want “a new Chernobyl”.
bombings
Occupied since the beginning of March, the power plant in the south of the country has been the victim of bomb attacks since the end of July, for which Moscow and Kyiv blame each other.
On Thursday evening, an official with the pro-Russian occupation administration of the Zaporizhia region, Vladimir Rogov, accused Ukrainian forces of bombing Energodar, the town near the nuclear power plant.
President Zelenskyy said on Thursday that the visit of his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Lviv was a “strong message of support” for his country.
He ruled out any peace talks with Moscow without the prior withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory.
“People who kill, rape, hit with cruise missiles our civilian cities every day cannot want peace. You should leave our territory first, then we’ll see,” Zelenskyy said at a press conference in Lviv, saying: “Don’t trust Russia.”
In the morning, the Russian army asserted that, contrary to what Kiev had claimed, it had not stationed “heavy weapons” in and around the Zaporizhia power plant.
For his part, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kouleba announced on Twitter that the Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi, had told him he was “ready” to head the work in a delegation.
The day before, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg had classified such an IAEA inspection as “urgent”.
Two villages evacuated
Meanwhile, two Russian villages were evacuated on Thursday over a fire that broke out at a munitions depot near the border with Ukraine, local authorities said.
This fire comes days after explosions at a military base and a munitions depot in Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Moscow, with Russia acknowledging the latter as an “act of sabotage”.
Fighting also continues in the Kharkiv region (northeast), where Ukrainians have accused the Russians of bombing residential areas, killing six people and injuring dozens in all on Thursday after 13 the previous evening.
Located about forty kilometers from the Russian border, this city, the second largest in Ukraine, is regularly bombed by Russian soldiers who never managed to capture it. According to the authorities, hundreds of civilians were killed in this region.
In the south, a strike in Mykolaiv killed one person and injured two others, Mayor Oleksandr Senkevych said.
The meeting of Zelensky, Erdogan and Guterres comes amid mounting negotiations to allow grain exports to resume from Ukraine, one of the world’s top producers and exporters.
Mr Guterres pledged on Thursday that his organization would work to “step up” Ukraine’s grain exports ahead of the onset of winter, which is vital to many African countries’ food supplies.
They were blocked for several months after the Russian invasion, raising the specter of a global food crisis.
In July, an agreement signed by Russia and Ukraine and endorsed by the United Nations and Turkey allowed these exports to resume.
Mr Erdogan, posing as a mediator on the issue, traveled to Russia in early August to speak to President Vladimir Putin about it.
A first UN-chartered humanitarian ship loaded with 23,000 tons of wheat left Ukraine for Ethiopia on Tuesday.
A ship loaded with grain sailed on Thursday, the 25th since the deal was signed, Ukrainian port authorities said.
However, a Russian ship carrying stolen Ukrainian grain has arrived in Syria, the Ukrainian embassy in Lebanon said Thursday after several grain trucks caused controversy by docking in the war-torn country.