Russia has intensified its “nuclear blackmail” against Kyiv by bombing the second Ukrainian nuclear power plant, the South-Ukrainian (Yudhnnaya) nuclear power plant, Ihor Polovychi, the director of this facility, said on Tuesday, AFP and Agerpres news agencies reported.

Ihor Polovych, director of the South Ukrainian NPPPhoto: Genya Savilov / AFP / Profimedia Images

The bombing of this station “started the second phase of their nuclear blackmail,” Polovych said, while the site of another Ukrainian nuclear facility, the Zaporizhzhia station (south), has already been bombed several times in recent months, raising fears of a possible nuclear accident.

On Tuesday, the AFP agency, during a press visit organized by the operator of the Ukrainian NPP, was able to verify the presence of a deep funnel strewn with projectile fragments, a few hundred meters from the South Ukrainian NPP in the Mykolaiv (Mykolaiv) region. power plant, Energoatom.

Tens of meters from the crater, an explosion exploded in a building that AFP was unable to visit, the doors and windows of which were broken. On the other side of the crater is another building, less destroyed, in which most of the windows were also broken.

According to Ivan Gebet, head of security at the South Ukrainian Central Station, on Monday, the police and the prosecutor’s office searched the place of the explosion for the presence of shrapnel, which they took to identify the projectile.

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The South Ukrainian NPP is the third nuclear facility that took part in the war launched by Russia in February against Ukraine, and this despite numerous calls from the international community to protect such infrastructure so as not to cause catastrophes on the European continent.

The Zaporizhzhia power station (south), the largest in Europe and occupied by Russian forces since the first weeks of the invasion, has been bombed several times in recent months.

Kyiv and Moscow blame each other for these explosions and nuclear blackmail.

Early in the invasion, Moscow forces also occupied the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (north), the site of the worst nuclear accident in human history in 1986. Closed since 2000, the station is located in an area heavily contaminated with radioactive waste.

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