Kyiv, Ukraine – The director of the United Nations nuclear agency is expected to visit Kyiv on Thursday as part of his efforts to establish a safe zone around Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, which was seized by Russia after its invasion of Ukraine in February.
Russia’s capture of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in south-eastern Ukraine in March, and a resulting battle with Ukraine and shelling near the occupied facility, has raised global concerns about the risk of a nuclear catastrophe.
Separately, Russian missiles hit the center of the nearby town of Zaporizhia on Thursday, killing at least one person, according to senior Ukrainian officials.
Russian officials said on Wednesday they had declared the Zaporizhzhia plant property of the Russian state, further adding to concerns about safety at the plant, which is still operated by Ukrainian engineers. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the Ukrainian president, called the decision “an attempted legal crackdown” by Russia and called for sanctions against the Russian nuclear agency.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said Wednesday its experts at the plant learned that engineers were planning to restart one of its six reactors to generate steam and heat needed to run the plant. The plant shut down its last operational reactor in September after the plant was reconnected to Ukraine’s power grid, the agency said. Although the reactors have been shut down, the facility still requires electricity to cool spent fuel and maintain ventilation units and other systems to avoid a nuclear safety mishap.
Rafael Mariano Grossi, the IAEA’s director-general, said in a tweet on Wednesday that establishing a security zone around the facility is “now more urgent than ever.” Mr. Grossi, who made a perilous journey across the frontlines of the war to visit the plant in August, also plans to travel to Russia to discuss the plant’s condition.
Russian authorities did not immediately comment on the attack on the nearby town of Zaporizhia.
Kirill Tymoshenko, an aide to Ukraine’s president, said at least seven rockets hit the center of the city, hitting a number of apartment buildings. At least six people were also injured in the strike, he said.
Verified video of the aftermath showed smoke billowing from the ruins of a building that had been reduced to rubble while firefighters searched for survivors. Mr Tymoshenko said Thursday morning that a rescue operation had begun.
The rocket attack in Zaporizhia followed premeditated attacks on civilians, according to a number of Ukrainian officials.
Photo: Portal
Ukrainian officials have said Russia has escalated a campaign of attacks that has hit civilian targets in recent weeks at a time when Moscow’s forces are losing ground to a swift Ukrainian military offensive. Ukrainian leaders have accused Russia of deliberately targeting civilians, including during strikes well behind the front lines, to exert psychological pressure on Ukraine’s broader population.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Wednesday evening that his forces had recaptured three villages in southern Ukraine’s Kherson region, accelerating his forces’ lightning offensive aimed at pushing back Russian occupation in the east. In his late-night address to the nation, he said Ukrainian forces had taken the villages of Novovoskresenske, Novohryhorivka and Petropavlivka.
Balakliya was among the first towns recaptured in Ukraine’s September offensive in the north-east of the country.
Photo: Serhii Korovayny for The Wall Street Journal
The villages were in one of the regions of Ukraine that Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed as part of Russia in a constitutional decree signed on Wednesday. Mr Putin formally declared four regions of Ukraine as Russian territory in a ceremony in Moscow on September 30. Among foreign nations, only North Korea has accepted Russian rule over the territories.
Mr Putin declared the annexation of part of Ukraine, mobilized hundreds of thousands of reservists and last month threatened nuclear strikes to escalate the war after weeks of his hold over eastern Ukraine waning due to Ukraine’s military offensive. Russia does not fully control any of the four regions of Ukraine it has declared its territory, including the Zaporizhia region where the city and nuclear power plant are located.
The Ukrainian offensive appears to have gained momentum in recent days, with Ukrainian forces gaining more territory with the help of hundreds of captured Russian tanks, armored vehicles and other military equipment.
The remains of a Russian tank block a road connecting the northeastern Ukrainian cities of Kharkiv and Izyum.
Photo: Serhii Korovayny for The Wall Street Journal
Britain’s Defense Ministry said on Thursday that Ukraine began “a new phase of offensive operations” in the Kherson region on October 2, advancing the front line some 12 miles.
“Russian forces have usually cut off contact and withdrawn,” the ministry said.
In his address on Wednesday night, Mr Zelensky also urged Russia’s use of Iranian-made drones to penetrate deep into Ukraine. A drone strike hit a military headquarters about 50 miles south of Kyiv early Wednesday, causing severe damage to the facility and unsettling civilians living in the surrounding city. “It won’t help you anyway. They’ve already lost,” Mr Zelensky said of the drone strikes.
Footage shared on social media on Wednesday showed multiple fires piercing buildings in a town near Kyiv after Russia attacked the area with hard-to-track Iranian-made drones, according to Ukrainian officials.
The drones struck again early Thursday in the city of Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine, local authorities said. The Kharkiv region prosecutor’s office, which released photos of the aftermath, said the strikes took place at 2:30 a.m. and 4:40 a.m. local time and sparked a large fire that damaged an industrial area. Three people were injured by shelling during the night, said the governor of the region.
The Ukrainian military also said Thursday it shot down nine more Russian drones in southern Ukraine.
Russia posed a new challenge to Ukraine’s air defenses when it began deploying Iran-made Shahed-136 Delta Wing drones in recent weeks. The relatively small drones fly at low altitudes, making them difficult for air defense systems to detect, military analysts say.
Russian planes also fired a missile at Ukraine from the airspace of neighboring Belarus early Thursday, the first time since August, Ukrainian military officials said. Belarus was Russia’s closest ally in the war against Ukraine and allowed its territory to be used in the first invasion of Ukraine in February.
Russian forces killed four civilians and wounded three others in the eastern Donetsk region, according to the region’s governor Pavlo Kyrylenko. The governor, who gave few other details, also said Thursday that the bodies of 10 civilians had been found in the recently liberated towns of Sviatohirsk and Lyman.
Samantha Power, the director of the US Agency for International Development, who visited Kyiv on Thursday, said Washington will give Ukraine $55 million to help the country prepare for the winter, including repairs and equipment for the winter Heating homes, hospitals, schools and businesses across the country.
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