On March 4th, the whole world watched the Russian army attacking Ukraine’s Zaporiz’ka nuclear power plant, the largest nuclear facility in Europe. The Russian military shelled an administrative building only hundreds of meters away from six WWER-1000 nuclear reactors and a nuclear waste storage facility.
“It was a miracle that Russian shells did not hit the reactor or its supporting system”, said a DTEK CEO Maxim Timchenko. He continued: “The civilised world cannot afford to silently watch the shelling of nuclear power plants, attempts to storm power plants or allow Russian military aircraft to fly over them. There is too much at stake to just rely on luck. Humanity survived Chernobyl and Fukushima but now Russia threatens another disaster of an even greater scale.
DTEK calls on Western countries, NATO and the United Nations to immediately introduce no-fly zones over all Ukrainian nuclear power plants. We have to prohibit any use of aviation, drones or cruise missiles in a 30-km zone around all five or our nuclear power plants. This goes way beyond the security of Ukraine. The fate of hundreds of millions of lives is at stake.”
