The situation is “serious” but in the process of stabilization at the Ukrainian nuclear power plant in Zaporizhia after the destruction of a dam, the IAEA chief said on the spot on Thursday, while, on the front, Kiev claimed slight progress .
The director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Rafael Grossi made the trip, postponed for a day, when Ukrainian forces went on the offensive on Russian positions in the south and east of Ukraine.
“We can observe on the one hand that the situation is serious, the consequences are there and they are real”, explained Mr. Grossi after spending three hours at the Zaporijjia power station, occupied since last year by the Russians.
“At the same time, measures are being taken to stabilize the situation,” he added, without specifying what these measures were.
His visit was intended in particular to determine whether this installation had been endangered by the destruction of the Kakhovka dam on the Dnieper, the great Ukrainian river, whose water was used to cool its six reactors.
Mr. Grossi, whose third trip to this place since the start of the war, said that the nuclear power plant in Zaporijjia, the largest in Europe, had “enough water”.
“I was able to see the cooling basin (…) the irrigation gates, the canals which constitute the essential cooling system” of the plant, he further declared.
The plant has been the target of repeated bombings, blamed on Moscow and kyiv, and has been cut off from the electricity grid on several occasions, raising concerns about its safety.
On the front, fighting continued after the offensive launched by the Ukrainian army more than a week ago on at least three sectors of the line of contact, where it reported the capture of a handful of towns.
In the south, Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Ganna Maliar claimed Thursday a “gradual but certain advance” by soldiers from Kiev, despite “powerful resistance” from Russian troops, who built defenses there for several months.
“The Ukrainian armed forces are confronted with the total mining of the fields”, she underlined, also referring to “the use of explosive drones” and “intense bombardments”.
According to her, Ukrainian forces have advanced “more than three kilometers” in the past ten days in the area of Bakhmout, a devastated city in the east which Moscow claimed to conquer in May.
In total, the Ukrainian army took over “more than 100 square kilometers” in a week of fighting, said a senior staff official, Oleksiï Gromov.
AFP journalists saw an artillery unit shelling Russian forces in Bakhmout in the eastern Donetsk region on Thursday. Ukrainian soldiers said they were advancing slowly on the northern and southern flanks of this city.
Conversely, the Russian president said this week that the Ukrainian attacks were repelled one after the other and that the losses of the adversary were close to a “catastrophic” level.
Vladimir Putin received his Algerian counterpart Abdelmadjid Tebboune on Thursday at the Kremlin, signing several agreements on this occasion to deepen the “strategic partnership” between Moscow and Algiers.
During the night, Russia also continued its strikes on Ukrainian urban centers.
President Volodymyr Zelensky’s hometown of Kryvyi Rig came under missile fire for the second time in three days.
Three of them hit “two industrial companies that have nothing to do with the army”, local military administration chief Oleksandre Vilkoul said on Telegram, reporting one injured.
The day before, twelve people were killed in the shelling of an apartment building and a warehouse.
According to the Ukrainian Air Force, a fourth missile and 20 drones from the north and south were intercepted by air defenses across the country.
In Crimea, a peninsula annexed in 2014 by Russia, the governor installed by Moscow assured that Russian forces had shot down nine Ukrainian drones.
One of these machines, however, hit a village in the center of this peninsula, breaking the windows of several houses. No casualties have been identified.
Finally, the Russian electoral commission announced Thursday the organization of local “elections” on September 10 in the territories that Russia occupies in Ukraine and of which it claimed the annexation in September 2022.
The purpose of these elections, according to this body, is to elect regional assemblies and municipal councils, even though fighting is raging there and Moscow only partially controls the regions of Lugansk and Donetsk in the east, from Zaporizhia and Kherson in the south.
15/06/2023 18:05:15 – Energodar (Ukraine) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP