The Russians will connect the Zaporizhzhia power plant with the

The Russians will connect the Zaporizhzhia power plant with the Crimea

Russian troops occupying Ukraine’s Zaporizhia nuclear power plant are preparing to connect it to Crimea, a peninsula annexed by Moscow in 2014, damaging it in the reorientation of power generation, Ukrainian operator Energoatom warned on Tuesday.

“The Russian military present at the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant is implementing the program of (the Russian operator) Rosatom, which aims to connect the power plant to the Crimean power grid,” Energoatom chairman Petro Kotin told Ukrainian television . “To do this, you must first damage the power lines of the facility connected to the Ukrainian power system. From August 7 to 9, the Russians have already damaged three power lines. At the moment the plant works with a single production line, which is an extremely dangerous way of working,” he added.

“When the last production line is shut down, the plant is powered by diesel-powered generators. Everything will then depend on their reliability and fuel reserves,” Petro Kotin also warned. Located near the town of Energodar on the Dnieper River, not far from Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula (south), the plant, the largest in Europe, has six of Ukraine’s 15 reactors, capable of powering four million homes. It came under the control of Russian troops on March 4, shortly after the start of the February 24 invasion of Ukraine.

Moscow and Kyiv have been accusing each other of bombing each other since Friday, with no independent source able to confirm this. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has raised the specter of the Chernobyl disaster. “Any attack on nuclear power plants is a suicidal thing,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned on Monday morning. “I hope these attacks will end. At the same time, I hope that the IAEA can access the facility.”

On Saturday, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) assessed the information from Zaporizhia, whose reactor had to be shut down after a bomb attack the day before, as “increasingly alarming”.

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