Evacuations from the front line around Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station prompted safety warnings from the UN nuclear watchdog on Saturday, as a string of strikes escalate predictions of a looming spring counteroffensive.
Moscow has blamed Kyiv — and its Western supporters — for an escalating number of long-range attacks and sabotage operations, including on the Kremlin.
Citing stepped-up shellings by Kyiv, Moscow has ordered families with children and elderly to temporarily evacuate a slew of Russian-held areas in southern Ukraine, including the town near Europe’s largest nuclear plant.
Photo: Reuters
“The general situation in the area near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is becoming increasingly unpredictable and potentially dangerous,” International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director-general Rafael Grossi said in a statement on Saturday. “I’m extremely concerned about the very real nuclear safety and security risks facing the plant.”
The removal order has led to “a mad panic and no less mad queues” at the checkpoint into Russian-annexed Crimea, said Ivan Fedorov, the mayor of Melitopol in Zaporizhzhia Oblast.
With buses ferrying people out every 20 to 30 minutes, he said stations have been drained of gasoline.
Photo: Reuters
“The partial evacuation they announced is going too fast, and there is a possibility that they may be preparing for provocations and [for that reason] focusing on civilians,” Fedorov wrote on Telegram.
A car bomb on Saturday morning wounded prominent nationalist writer Zakhar Prilepin and killed his assistant in an attack that Moscow pinned on Kyiv and Washington.
Investigators said that Ukraine was behind the blast that wrecked Prilepin’s vehicle in Nizhny Novgorod, about 400km from Moscow.
They published images of a partly destroyed, overturned car and said the well-known novelist was taken to a hospital.
Suspect Alexander Permyakov acted “on the instructions from the Ukrainian special services,” said the Russian Investigative Committee, which handles major crimes.
Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhaylo Podolyak appeared to suggest the attack was due to Russian in-fighting, referring to the biblical figure Moloch, a pagan deity who “devours his enemies ... and finally devours his own.”
Later, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs also blamed Washington for the attack.
“The responsibility for this terrorist act, and for others, does not lie only with Ukraine, but also with its Western minders, primarily the United States,” it said.
Prilepin is a vocal supporter of Moscow’s offensive in Ukraine, where he fought alongside pro-Russian separatists in 2014. He has been a frequent visitor to pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine since the start of the conflict in April 2014.
There have been two previous killings of nationalists, both of which Russia blamed on Ukraine.
Last month, a blast from a statuette rigged with explosives killed 40-year-old pro-Kremlin military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky.
The Kremlin said that attack had been orchestrated by Ukraine with the help of supporters of jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, but observers said the bombing could be used to justify a further crackdown on critics.
In August last year, Darya Dugina, the daughter of a prominent nationalist intellectual, was killed in a car bombing outside Moscow, which Russia blamed on Ukraine. Kyiv denied the charges.
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