Russia has repeatedly launched drones and missiles on a flight path near the disused Chernobyl nuclear plant during attacks on Ukraine, elevating the risk of a major accident, Ukraine’s top state prosecutor said.
Ukrainian Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko detailed the previously unreported Russian military activity near Ukrainian nuclear sites in written remarks, as Ukraine prepares to mark Sunday’s 40th anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
Apart from the decommissioned Chernobyl power station, Ukraine has four nuclear power plants, including Europe’s largest, which lies in the southern Zaporizhzhia region and has been occupied by Russian forces since soon after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Photo: AP
The Chernobyl site and western Ukraine’s two-reactor Khmelnytskyi nuclear plant have been on the flight path of Russian hypersonic Kinzhal missiles since the invasion, Kravchenko said.
Thirty-five Kinzhals have been detected within about 20km of the Chernobyl facility or the Khmelnytskyi plant, he said.
Of them, 18 passed within about 20km of both sites on the same flight, he added.
“Such launches cannot be explained by any military considerations. It is evident that the flights over the nuclear facilities are carried out solely for the purpose of intimidation and terror,” he said.
The Russian Ministry of Defense did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) watchdog said it frequently reported about military activity in the vicinity of nuclear power plants and attacks on electrical substations that are key to nuclear safety.
The Kinzhal is an air-launched hypersonic missile that can carry a warhead of 500kg and has been championed by Russian President Vladimir Putin. When traveling at 6,500kph, it covers 5km in a few seconds.
In three separate cases, Kinzhal missiles had fallen to the ground during their flights and landed within about 10km of the Khmelnytskyi nuclear power plant, Kravchenko said.
It was not clear why the missiles came down, but Kravchenko said the wreckage bore no indications that they had been intercepted.
An explosion at Chernobyl sent radiation across Europe in 1986 and prompted Soviet authorities to mobilize vast numbers of personnel and equipment to deal with the aftermath of the accident. The plant’s last working reactor was closed in 2000.
Russia occupied the plant for more than a month in the first weeks of its invasion as its forces initially tried to advance on the capital, Kyiv, before withdrawing.
Since July 2024, when Russia began heavy drone attacks on Ukraine, radar had detected at least 92 Russian drones that flew within 5km of the Chernobyl plant’s radiation shield, Kravchenko said.
The containment shield was installed to prevent radiation leaking from Reactor No. 4, which exploded on April 26, 1986, causing a huge fire.
The actual number of flybys was almost certainly much higher than 92, because the tracks visible on Ukraine’s military radars can denote more than one drone and sometimes drones do not show up at all, Kravchenko said.
“Deliberate flights of [drones] with a powerful warhead over a nuclear facility are at least extremely irresponsible and indicate a complete disregard ... for the safety of civilians not only in Ukraine, but throughout Europe,” he said.
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