Russia is planning to attack Ukrainian nuclear power plants and disconnect them from the energy grid, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Wednesday, warning that such attacks risk nuclear disaster.
“Radiation does not respect state borders,” Zelensky said Wednesday in his address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
Since Russia “can’t defeat our people’s resistance on the battlefield,” Zelensky said Russian President Vladimir Putin is “looking for other ways to break the Ukrainian spirit.”
For a third winter, Russia is stepping up its strikes on Ukraine’s energy grid in a bid to plunge the country into the “dark and cold,” Zelensky said.
Zelensky’s address to the UN came shortly before he is set to discuss his “victory plan” with United States President Joe Biden, which is expected to include Kyiv’s long-stated request to use long-range missiles to strike military targets inside Russia.
In his speech Zelensky recalled the “horrifying” moment in the first weeks of the war when Russian attacks on the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), the largest in Europe, stirred fears among Ukrainians of another Chernobyl-style disaster.
“No one could know how Russian strikes on the nuclear facility would end, and everyone in Ukraine was reminded of what Chernobyl means,” he said.
