Russia planning attacks on Ukrainian nuclear power plants, Zelensky warns

(CNN) — Russia is planning to attack Ukrainian nuclear power plants and disconnect them from the energy grid, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Wednesday, warning that such attacks risk nuclear disaster.

“Radiation does not respect state borders,” Zelensky said Wednesday in his address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

Since Russia “can’t defeat our people’s resistance on the battlefield,” Zelensky said Russian President Vladimir Putin is “looking for other ways to break the Ukrainian spirit.”

For a third winter, Russia is stepping up its strikes on Ukraine’s energy grid in a bid to plunge the country into the “dark and cold,” Zelensky said.

Zelensky’s address to the UN came shortly before he is set to discuss his “victory plan” with United States President Joe Biden, which is expected to include Kyiv’s long-stated request to use long-range missiles to strike military targets inside Russia.

In his speech Zelensky recalled the “horrifying” moment in the first weeks of the war when Russian attacks on the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), the largest in Europe, stirred fears among Ukrainians of another Chernobyl-style disaster.

“No one could know how Russian strikes on the nuclear facility would end, and everyone in Ukraine was reminded of what Chernobyl means,” he said.

Two-and-a-half years later, Zelensky warned the Russian-occupied ZNPP remains “at risk of a nuclear incident.” Russia and Ukraine have blamed previous incidents at the plant on each other. Ukraine has three other nuclear plants, according to the World Nuclear Association.

CNN has previously reported that the risk of a large-scale nuclear incident at the ZNPP is low, since Ukrainian operators put the plant’s reactors into a “cold shutdown” mode in June 2023.

If the plant’s reactors were to be blown open, the cold reactor would “expose spent fuel to the air, which will spread some radiation,” William Alberque, Director of Strategy, Technology and Arms Control at the International Institute for Strategy Studies, told CNN.

This would create a radiation zone where “you’ll have a higher chance of cancer over the next 40 years,” but will not recreate the sort of destruction seen after the meltdown of the active Chernobyl plant in 1986.

While the risk of a large-scale nuclear incident is low, the threat to Ukraine’s energy system remains high.

“Russia has destroyed all our thermal power plants, and a large part of our hydroelectric capacity,” Zelensky said. He said that 80% of Ukraine’s energy system had been disabled by Russia’s assaults.

Absent from Zelensky’s speech, however, was reference to Ukraine’s hopes to be granted permission to use Western weapons to strike targets deep into Russia.

Before traveling to the US, Zelensky told CNN that Ukraine’s request was a key part of his “victory plan.”

Radek Sikorski, Poland’s Foreign Minister, told CNN it is vital that Ukraine’s request be granted. He recalled a recent incident in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, where an entire family was wiped out by a Russian missile strike.

“The missile that killed that family was launched from a Russian bomber flying over Russian territory from a Russian airfield. Give me one reason why Ukraine should not be able to take out that bomber and take out that airfield,” Sikorski said.

“The victim of aggression has the right to defend itself also on the territory of the aggressor,” he added, saying “we are making those arguments to the US.”

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