A showdown for control of the largest nuclear power plant in Europe looms over the war in Ukraine as Russia's occupying forces hope to avoid another high-profile defeat.
“I think Ukrainians [are] hitting RU command posts and positions that direction,” a senior European official told the Washington Examiner. “And they are precise. They want to take it back.”
“One Russian milblogger claimed that the shelling came from Russian-controlled territory south of the plant, but most Russian sources accused Ukraine,” the Institute for the Study of War noted Sunday. Some pro-Russian observers suspect that “the Kremlin will transfer control over ZaporizhzhiaNPP to the IAEA and then to Kyiv” in tandem with a crackdown on Putin’s internal critics.
"Access will be given but strictly within their mandate,” Rosenergoatom adviser Renat Karchaa told Tass, a Russian state media outlet, on Sunday. “The IAEA is an organization addressing issues of nuclear security. Naturally, we will give them access to corresponding facilities. But [if] they want to inspect the facility [in an area] which has no relation to nuclear security, access will be denied — not because we want to conceal anything but because they should work within their mandate.
Ukraine’s energy agency leadership has accused Russia of planning to “steal” the power plant, as it was, by disconnecting it from the Ukrainian electric grid and integrating it into the Russian energy system. Ukrainian officials, for their part, regard the reclamation of the power plant as “a key condition to achieving victory” in the war and their long-term ambition to “replace Russia as the primary supplier of energy to the rest of Europe.
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