Kyiv, Ukraine – Artillery shelling along a frontline section near an endangered nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine hit towns, ammunition dumps and a Russian military base in heavy fighting overnight, Ukrainian officials said Sunday.
Reports of fighting along the southern front suggested that neither side was stopping hostilities, even amid complex negotiations to allow a team of scientists from the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which has been repeatedly damaged by recent bombings. The plant is controlled by the Russian military but operated by Ukrainian engineers.
Russian forces fired rocket and shell artillery overnight into the Ukrainianheld city of Nikopol in front of the plant on the opposite side of the Dnipro River, which separates the two armies in the area, a local military official said. Valentin Reznichenko. The strikes damaged several houses and cars and cut power to 1,500 residents, he said in a post on the Telegram social network.
In another assault on the city, Russian helicopters fired rockets, according to the Ukrainian military, which reported damage to a house but no injuries.
The Russian Defense Ministry said its Air Force had struck Ukrainian workshops where helicopters were being repaired in the surrounding Zaporizka region, according to Russian state news agency RIA Novosti. The claim could not be independently verified.
Artillery shells have already hit the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, damaging auxiliary equipment and power lines, but not the reactors. The attacks, which each side blames on the other, have sparked fears of a release of radiation if fighting continues in the area, a stretch of farmland on the banks of the Dnipro.
After struggling to cut a highvoltage power line last week, control room operators implemented emergency procedures to cool the reactor cores with pumps powered by diesel generators. The power line has since been repaired.
In a sign of growing concern over a possible radiation release in a country still haunted by the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, a Ukrainian official announced Saturday that the government would distribute a drug, potassium iodide, that can protect against some radiation poisoning , to the people inside. 35 miles from the plant.
Plant employees and outside experts say an artillery strike would not penetrate the onethick reinforced concrete of the containment vessels above the sites’ six reactors, but could damage the reactors’ complex support equipment or cause fires that could burn out of control. Artillery strikes could also rupture less robust containers used to store spent nuclear fuel.
Ukrainian forces also reported attacking targets behind Russian lines in occupied areas of southern Ukraine. The Ukrainian military claimed to have hit two Russian ammunition dumps in Kherson province. Retaking the city of Kherson is a goal of a longplanned Ukrainian counteroffensive in the south, where the nuclear power plant, used as a stronghold by the Russian military, is a potential obstacle to Ukrainian advances.
On the east bank of the Dnipro, a massive explosion early Sunday shook windows and sent plaster raining from roofs in the Russiancontrolled city of Melitopol, according to Ukraine’s exiled mayor Ivan Fedorov.
Fedorov said that the explosion had destroyed “one of the largest enemy military bases”, although the claim could not be verified. The base, he said, had been set up on the grounds of a factory complex.
Melitopol is a center of activity for Ukrainian saboteurs, known as partisans. It was not immediately clear whether the explosion was the result of a partisan attack or a longrange attack from Ukrainianheld territory on the other side of the front line.
Russian state news agencies said Ukraine had fired from the High Mobility Rocket Artillery System, a precision rocket system provided to Ukraine by several NATO countries that used to hit targets well behind Russia’s front lines. RIA Novosti said the strike had hit an abandoned factory and there were no casualties. These claims also could not be verified.