A fire broke out Sunday at Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, located in southern Ukraine, but the UN’s atomic energy watchdog said nuclear safety was not affected.
Ukraine and Russia have been trading blame over the incident.
The region’s governor said that the fire broke out in the plant’s cooling system due to shelling by the Ukrainian army.
The Kremlin’s spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, called the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ attack on the power plant “nuclear terror on the continent.”
But Ukraine’s President Zelensky said they “recorded from Nikopol that the Russian occupiers have started a fire on the territory of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.”
“Since the first day of its seizure, Russia has been using the Zaporizhzhia NPP only to blackmail Ukraine, all of Europe, and the world,” he wrote on X.
The nuclear power plant has been under the control of Russian troops and officials since 2022. It has not produced power in more than two years and all six reactors have been in cold shutdown since April.
In any case, the fire has since been extinguished.
