Ukraine spy chief accuses Russia of ‘mining’ cooling pond at Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant

KYIV - Ukraine’s military intelligence chief accused Russia on Tuesday of “mining” the cooling pond used to keep the reactors cool at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in Ukraine’s south.

The six-reactor complex, Europe’s biggest nuclear plant, has been under Russian occupation since shortly after Moscow’s forces invaded in February 2022.

“… Most terrifying is that the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant was additionally mined during that time… namely the cooling pond was mined,” Major-General Kyrylo Budanov, head of the GUR agency, said on television, without providing evidence for his assertion.

Reuters requested comment from the Russian Defence Ministry.

The two sides have accused each other of shelling the plant and its environs, and international efforts to establish a demilitarised zone around the complex have failed so far.

Ukraine’s Defence Ministry, meanwhile, dismissed as “null and void” a Russian suggestion that it could be building a “dirty bomb”.

The ministry said the suggestion, made on Monday by Mr Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service, was first advanced by Moscow in 2022.

The move was, a ministry statement said, aimed at “diverting attention from the clear defeats by occupation forces at the front and sowing distrust among Ukraine’s Western allies”.

“If Russia is talking about a ‘dirty bomb’, its use by Russia could be a real threat,” the ministry added.

Mr Naryshkin had called on the United Nations nuclear watchdog and the European Union to investigate the dispatch of “irradiated fuel” from the Rivne nuclear plant in western Ukraine for disposal at a spent fuel storage facility in Chornobyl.

The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency said that it had reported in June on the transfer of spent fuel from Rivne to Chornobyl and taken full account of the material. REUTERS