By the time Russian soldiers put a bag over his head and forced him to make a false statement on video about conditions at Europe’s largest nuclear facility, Igor Murasov had seen enough of the chaos at the station.
Murasov, the former general director of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, didn’t know how much more stress the workers could endure as they race to save one crisis after another to avert a nuclear holocaust.
He watched as the officers trudged to what they called the “pit” at the nearest police station and returned beaten and bruised—if they came back, that is. He was there when advancing Russian soldiers opened fire on the facility in the early days of the war. He saw how the Russians used the nuclear reactor rooms to hide military equipment at the risk of an accident.
Murasov, 46, fled Zaporozhye after being expelled from Russian-occupied territory in October. According to Ukrainian officials and international observers, the situation at the plant became more dangerous in the following months.
On March 9, it went offline for the sixth time since Russian occupation, forcing nuclear engineers to rely on massive diesel generators to keep critical cooling equipment running.
Rafael Mariano Grossi, Director General of the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has repeatedly sounded the alarm about the rising risks and plans to visit the facilities this week. On Monday, he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to discuss the issue.
Only about 4,600 of the plant’s 11,000 employees are still working, Petr Kotin, head of Ukraine’s state-owned nuclear power company Energoatom, said in an interview. Workers at the plant were given until April 1 to sign contracts with Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear group. According to Kotin, about 2,600 people have signed the contract, while the rest are still refusing.
The current problems came as no surprise to Murasov, who gave a shocking account of how Europe’s largest nuclear power plant fell into such disarray.
His account has not been independently verified, but it matches those of other workers who have since fled and those still there who have been interviewed by the New York Times and other news organizations over the past year.
Source: Kathimerini
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