“They had large amounts of explosives, handguns, grenade launchers. They were very well prepared. […] Thanks to the investigative work carried out, not only was the attempted attack foiled, but the group was arrested without firing a single shot,” said the TASS agency official.
Rogov did not provide details on the date of the operation, but stressed that those arrested knew the design features of the facility and wanted to attack its most vulnerable spot.
He also noted that preliminary data suggests that the saboteurs planned an attack during the visit of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) mission, whose specialists arrived in the city of Zaporozhye to get to the nuclear facility.
The official explained that with this action Kyiv wanted to show that the plant is not safe under the control of the Russian military, thereby “justifying a possible deployment of the peacekeeping contingent,” he stressed.
In a video of the arrest published by the RT chain, it can be seen that the attackers were fully armed and even had foreign satellite systems at their disposal.
Earlier, they had been denounced by the city’s civil-military administration that before the arrival of the IAEA delegation, the Ukrainian military had launched more than 60 attacks on the city of Energodar, as well as on the nuclear power plant and the adjacent areas in the last 24 hours.
The provisional authorities specified that the enemy troops used artillery pieces with exploding projectiles and drones fired from the city of Márganets under the control of Kyiv for the offensive.
In particular, 57 artillery hits were recorded on the factory premises, one of them with the help of an unmanned aerial vehicle against the factory’s training center. Another struck near the main entrance of the solid radioactive waste storage facility.
From the Energodar administration they assure that the attacks left no injuries while the radioactive background is normal.
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