Kursk NPP
The Ukrainian Armed Forces have made an attempt to strike Russia’s Kursk Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), President Vladimir Putin said during a cabinet meeting on August 22.
“Last night, the enemy attempted to strike the atomic power plant,” Putin said. “The International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] has been informed. They promised to come themselves and send specialists to assess the situation. I hope they actually do so.”
The IAEA already has observers working at the Zaporozhye NPP, Europe’s largest such facility. The mission was deployed in the summer of 2023 amid regular attempts of Kyiv’s forces to attack and damage the plant. In one of the most recent cases, in August, a Ukrainian drone attack set one of the cooling towers at the plant on fire.
Reports claim that Rosatom CEO Alexey Likhachev has discussed the situation at both power plants with IAEA director Rafael Grossi, and invited him to visit Kursk to personally assess the situation.
Grossi has accepted the invitation and is planning to visit Kursk next week, an IAEA spokesman told AFP. However, the posture of IAEA regarding the situation in Kursk will not likely be very different from that regarding Zaporozhye NPP. To be clear, IAEA tries to pretend that it does not know what side regularly shells and attacks Zaporozhye NPP.
Moreover, the Russian side recently reported Ukraine was preparing a “dirty bomb” for a false flag attack on either the Kursk or Zaporozhye NPP. Moscow said it was taking these reports seriously and warned that any such attack would be met immediately with “tough military and military-technical countermeasures.”
In August, the Ukrainian leadership ordered a large-scale attack on Russia’s Kursk Region deploying thousands of troops and hundreds of pieces of military equipment for this.
The town of Kurchatov, where the nuclear facility is located, was likely among the targets of the attack. Kyiv’s forces were not able to develop any large success and reach it. However, an intense fighting is still ongoing in the region. The Ukrainian Armed Forces have been trying to keep control of a group of border villages that they captured in the first days of the attack.
