The fear that the war in Ukraine will lead to a major atomic incident is only growing.

On Monday, kyiv accused Russia of bombing the site of a nuclear power plant in the south of the country.

This Ukrainian nuclear site is the third to be drawn into the war launched by Russia in February against Ukraine, and this, despite multiple calls from the international community to spare such infrastructures in order to avoid a continental catastrophe.

Moscow for its part denounced Monday the "lie" of Ukraine three days after the discovery of hundreds of bodies buried in the forest near the city of Izium recently taken over from the Russian army.

kyiv accused the Russian army of abuses.

Moscow puts "the whole world in danger"

Reacting to the missile strike that hit the site of the Pivdennonooukrainsk power plant, in the Mykolaiv region (south), President Volodymyr Zelensky judged that Russia was endangering “the whole world”.

"We have to stop it until it's too late," he said on Telegram, posting surveillance video showing a large explosion.

According to the operator Energoatom, "a powerful explosion occurred just 300 meters from the reactors" of this plant, lending it to a night strike from a Russian missile.

260 kilometers as the crow flies to the west, another Ukrainian nuclear power plant, that of Zaporozhye, the largest in Europe and occupied by Russian troops since the first weeks of the invasion, has been targeted in numerous repeated by bombardments in recent months causing great concern.

From Chernobyl to Zaporozhye

kyiv and Moscow blame each other and accuse each other of nuclear blackmail.

However, the situation there has improved in recent days, and the plant has been reconnected to the Ukrainian electricity grid.

The Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), an organization which has had observers on site since early September, called on Russia to withdraw.

At the start of the Russian invasion, Moscow forces also occupied the site of the Chernobyl power plant (north), one of whose reactors exploded in 1986, causing radioactive fallout in much of Europe.

The occupation of the site had raised fears for the safety of the damaged reactor's containment sarcophagus.

Russian forces finally withdrew in the spring after the failed offensive on kyiv.

kyiv "prepares the next steps" of its counter-offensive

In Pivdennonooukrainsk, the power station was operating normally on Monday morning despite the missile strike which blew out a hundred windows and caused a brief disconnection of three high-voltage lines.

The bombardment comes as Russian forces had a string of failures in September, with their retreat from a large part of the northeast of the country in the face of a lightning counter-offensive by the Ukrainians in the Kharkiv region.

Kyiv's troops also regained ground, but more slowly, in the south.

For several days, however, the Ukrainian advance has slowed down.

President Zelensky insisted on Sunday evening that it was "not a pause", but "preparing the next steps", with Russia controlling a large part of Donbass (east) and the regions of Kherson and Zaporozhye ( south), after having annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in 2014.

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  • Volodymyr Zelensky

  • War in Ukraine

  • Chernobyl

  • Russia

  • Kyiv (Kyiv)

  • Nuclear

  • World