Russian and Ukrainian forces were fighting for control of the Chernobyl exclusion zone on Thursday evening local time, with Ukrainian officials warning that damage to nuclear storage facilities could send “radioactive dust” across Europe.
“Russian occupation forces are trying to seize the” Chernobyl nuclear power plant, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said in a Twitter post. “Our defenders are giving their lives so that the tragedy of 1986 will not be repeated….This is a declaration of war against the whole of Europe.”
The Chernobyl reactor was the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history, when the core of the reactor melted down. Anton Herashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s Ministry of the Interior, wrote on Facebook that Russian forces had moved to Chernobyl from Belarus, Ukraine’s northern neighbor.
“National Guard troops responsible for protecting the storage unit for dangerous radioactive waste are putting up fierce resistance,” Herashchenko wrote, in an English translation posted by the New York Times. If an explosion punctures the encasement of the reactor, “radioactive dust could cover the territory of Ukraine, Belarus and the countries of the European Union.”
The attack on Chernobyl comes amid a Russian invasion of Ukraine from the north, east, and the southern Crimea peninsula.
Ground forces began to pour across the Russia-Ukraine border early Thursday morning local time, hours after an aggressive aerial bombardment targeting virtually every major Ukrainian city, including the capital city of Kyiv; Kharkiv, the second-largest city in Ukraine, which sits just 20 miles from the Russian border; and Odessa, the strategically valuable southern port city.
Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said earlier on Thursday that there are hundreds of casualties, but it was not immediately clear how many of those were wounded or dead.
Zelensky claimed that an airborne Russian force that initially took control of the Hostomel airport, also known as the Antonov Airport, 25 miles from Kyiv, has been stopped by Ukrainian forces.
Meanwhile, a senior U.S. Department of Defense official said Russia would likely attempt to instal a puppet regime in Kyiv.
“Our assessment is they have every intention of decapitating the government and installing their own method of governance,” the official told reporters. “We haven't seen a conventional move like this, nation-state to nation-state, since World War II, and if it unfolds the way that hereto we believe it will come to, it has every potential to be very bloody, very costly, and very impactful on European security writ large.”
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