Russian shelling of the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant by Ukraine and its implication on reconstruction in the region of the occupied Crimea peninsula

The UN’s nuclear watchdog condemned new shelling near Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which just disconnected the plant from Ukraine’s power grid, according to its operator.

The director general of the IAEO said the shelling is irresponsible.

The last power line connecting the plant to the grid was destroyed by Russian forces, according to the Ukrainian nuclear operator. Diesel generators are the new sources of power at the plant.

Rogov also said that Ukrainians “have concentrated significant number of militants in Zaporizhzhia direction” and that the risk of storming the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant “remains high”.

Vladimir Rogov, a senior pro-Russian official in the Zaporizhia government, said that the plant can be put back into operation.

A senior official said that crews restored power and cellular connection in the city near the nuclear power plant that is under Russian control.

“Water supply will be restored in the near future,” Rogov, a pro-Russian leader in the regional Zaporizhzhia government, wrote in a telegram post Sunday

Orlov said “the Ukrainian authorities have repeatedly tried to deliver humanitarian supplies with food, hygiene products and so on to the city,” adding that Ukraine is “ready to organize prompt delivery and distribution of drinking water in Enerhodar” but that Russian forces have not let humanitarian aid through.

This week, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine told the international community just how much money his country currently needed to rebuild and keep its economy afloat: $57 billion. He gave the figures to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Mr. Zelensky said that the country would need $17 billion to build schools, hospitals, transport systems, and housing as well as expanding exports to Europe and restoring Ukrainian energy infrastructure.

After the bombardment of Ukraine began on Monday, Mr. Putin said he had ordered it in retaliation for a truck-bombing that badly damaged the vital Kerch Strait Bridge connecting Russia to the occupied Crimea Peninsula. Moscow has tried to minimize the impact of the attack, but new satellite imagery suggests that it has, in fact, been substantial.

The images captured hundreds of cargo trucks backed up and waiting to cross from Crimea into Russia by ferry, some five days after the bombing. The images, taken on Wednesday by Maxar, show a huge backups at the port in Kerch and an airport that is apparently being used as a staging area.

The long lines for the ferry crossing were worsened by the security checkpoint set up after the bridge explosion, said Oleg Ignatov, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group.

Russian authorities appeared to be preparing the public for a possible retreat from parts of the Kherson region, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a research group based in Washington. Russian commanders had recommended retreating across the Dnipro, but Putin refused to allow it, according to American officials.

Russia withdrew from the east bank of the Dnipro River in the southern Kherson region, leaving the regional capital of the same name to the Ukrainians.

The Ukrainian military said Sunday the Russians were still conducting assaults in the Bakhmut, Avdiivka and Novopavlikvka areas, all in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region. The AFU stated that other areas are also getting hit.

The US thinks that as long as the weather continues to be mild, the Ukranian government will be able to take back territory it lost to Russia early in the war. The agencies were careful not to think of Russian defeat like the one seen last month in the east of the country.

There was confusion over the status of the town of Enerhodar, located on the east bank of the Dnipro river, which is under Russian occupation. Ukrainian officials said that Russian forces were leaving, but The Times could not confirm that, nor was it clear whether such a departure would indicate withdrawal or simply a routine rotation of troops.

While the Russian state media said that the power lines had been damaged by the Ukrainians, the exiled Ukrainian head of the Kherson regional military administration blamed Russian troops.

The Russian forces have also placed mines around water towers in Beryslav, Mr. Yanushevych said, referring to a town less than 50 miles from Kherson city and just north of a critical dam near the front lines of the fighting.

Some Ukrainian officials and residents say the civilian evacuation was a pretext for forced deportations. Some people say it was to clear space for new Russian troops.

Some 250,000 people lived in the city before the war. It’s impossible to know how accurate estimates by Ukrainian activists are.

When Russian forces stormed across the Antonivsky Bridge over the Dnipro River in March and into Kherson city, a major port and a former shipbuilding center, it marked their biggest success of the early days of the war. The effort by Mr. Putin to use the Kherson region as a bridgehead for a drive to Odesa failed.

The city of Kherson had almost no water and was facing a shortage of bread and medicines due to mines removed, according to officials.

But life remains far from normal, with authorities warning residents to be wary of explosives littering the city, and Russian forces still nearby – just across the strategically important Dnipro River.

This is not the end of the struggle against the Russian occupation in the country, reports CNN’s Nic Robertson, who witnessed emotional scenes Saturday in Kherson’s central square as residents hailed their liberation.

He said, “Kherson is now a front line city.” In the early hours of this morning, you could hear gunfire towards the Russian forces.

On Saturday, Ukraine’s National Police warned “the main threat at the moment is mass mining,” with a police representative injured while demining one of the city’s administrative buildings.

In his address Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned that over two thousand explosives have already been removed from the Kherson region. He told Kherson residents to be careful and not try to look for anything left by the occupiers.

There are bomb disposal experts working in Kherson along with the police, and other units of the defense forces.

Infrastructure has taken an unwelcome hit: Zelensky said that “before fleeing from Kherson, the occupiers destroyed all critical infrastructure – communication, water supply, heat, electricity.”

The weather is getting cold at night, and there is no heating in the city. The authorities said that those who find it hard to live in Kherson could move to another part of the country.

Operations and Strategic Plane for the Ukrainian Defence Forces as the Cold and Dark Will Fail: Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko

Satellite images from Maxar Technologies obtained by CNN on Friday showed water flowing out of three sluice gates at the dam, where a major hydroelectric project is situated.

The next steps for the Ukrainian military are going to be a major urban operation. What you are going to see is a methodical operation to clear buildings of potential booby traps and mines.

“Another thing that the Ukrainians will have to do is they’re going to have to move their systems forward so that they can counter any possible Russian artillery that is going to be on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River.

Russian troops are focusing their efforts in the Kherson region on equipping their defensive lines on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River, an operational update from the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) General Staff said Sunday night.

Putin declared Russian territory just five weeks ago, after they withdrew eastward across the Dnipro, surrendering large swathes of land that Russia had occupied since the beginning of the war.

Russia has been unleashing large-scale strikes on Ukraine’s power systems since Oct. 10 in an effort to cut off power to civilians as the country heads into winter.

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on the Telegram messaging app “one of the capital’s infrastructure facilities has been hit.” The city’s running water was cut off due to shelling, which killed a 17-year-old girl.

Klitschko also said 21 of the 31 missiles targeted at Kyiv were shot down. This could not be independently verified but the Ukrainians claim to have shot down two-thirds to three-quarters of the Russian missiles.

“Russia is using missile strikes across the country as punishment for daring to be free,” the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine wrote in a twit. “Russia’s attempt to dominate Ukraine by plunging it into the cold and dark will fail.”

Ukraine’s nuclear power crisis and its impact on the lives of civilians in the wake of Russian attacks: comments on Twitter by a Ukranian official

After a brief emergency, the nuclear reactors were still not reconnected to the national grid, according to the company.

In the west of the country, one regional administrator, Serhii Hamalii, said on Telegram that most of the surrounding area was without power and water due to the Russian attacks. This led to the Khmelnytskyi nuclear power station being taken offline.

Vitaliy Kim, the military administrator in the southern region of Myolaiv, said that a nuclear plant had been cut off from the grid and that it would be dangerous to restart it.

The cascading effect of power cuts on the heat and water has been stressed out by Ukrainian officials. The water in the pipes could freeze, which made the situation worse.

In Moldova, President Maia Sandu wrote this about Russia on Facebook: “We can’t trust a regime that leaves us in the dark and cold, that purposely kills people for the mere desire to keep other peoples poor and humble.”

Ukraine is scrambling to prepare for the winter. In a video address Tuesday, Zelenskyy said there were 4,000 centers available to take care of civilians in the event of power cuts.

Vladimir Putin and the Russian Military: Ukraine’s energy infrastructure strikes have ceased, but people are still doing something for the whole universe,” Putin told CNN on Thursday

He called them “points of invincibility,” saying they will provide heat, water, phone charging and internet access. There will be many in government buildings.

President Vladimir Putin made rare public comments specifically addressing the Russian military’s attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure Thursday, while clutching a glass of champagne at a Kremlin reception.

He gave a speech after the awards ceremony for the Heroes of Russia. He said that they were doing the attacks. Who started it?

Last week Putin appeared on the Kerch Bridge, where he was shown repairs and drove a car across the structure that he himself officially opened in 2018.

He ended his off-the- cuff comments by suggesting that people don’t mention that water has been cut off in the city. “No one has said a word about it anywhere. At all! Complete silence.”

The Russian president tersely compared the difference in reactions to attacks on Russia and attacks on Ukraine, saying, “as soon as we make a move, do something in response – noise, clamor, crackle for the whole universe.”

He made a toast to the soldiers listening at the end of the speech, and then sipped from his champagne glass.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/09/europe/putin-ukrainian-infrastructure-strikes-intl/index.html

Report of the November 11 Detonation of the Kakhovka Reservoir by Russia in Ukraine and Implications for Agriculture and Power Systems

In a statement in November, Ukrenergo acknowledged that the race to restore power to homes is being hampered by “strong winds, rain and sub-zero temperatures.”

A top Ukrainian official said the attacks on the country’s energy grid amount to genocide. The Ukrainian prosecutor-general made a comment to the radio station.

Russia appears to be draining an enormous reservoir in Ukraine, imperiling drinking water, agricultural production and safety at Europe’s largest nuclear plant, according to satellite data obtained by NPR.

Russian troops blew up a road over the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Dam on November 11 of 2022, as Ukrainian forces advanced.

At stake is drinking water for hundreds of thousands of residents, irrigation for nearly half-a-million acres of farmland, and the cooling system at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant. Late last week, the International Atomic Energy Agency said it was aware of the potential risk posed by dropping water levels at the reservoir.

The reservoir is essential to supplying water to otherwise arid farmland in the southern part of the country, according to Brian Kuns, a geographer at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences who has studied farming in southern Ukraine. A network of canals leading from the reservoir irrigates roughly 200,000 hectares (494,000 acres) of farmland that is used to grow sunflowers, grain and vegetables. “It’s very important locally,” Kuns says.

Initially some feared that the explosion would damage the dam and spill water from the reservoir, but Helms says it seems to have destroyed the road, while leaving the dam’s sluice gates mostly intact.

However immediately after the detonation, it appears that Russian forces deliberately used two gantry cranes on the Russian-controlled side of the dam to open additional sluice gates, allowing water to rush out of the reservoir.

The result has been quite shocking. The current level is 14 meters, 2 meters below its normal height. The water level has been falling since December and is now at its lowest level in 30 years.

The water supply of several cities that depend on the dam, including Enerhodar, could be at risk due to Russia’s annexation of Berdyansk.

Kuns is not sure of Russia’s intentions. The majority of the affected agricultural areas are in Russian-held parts of Ukraine. It seems weird that they would be doing a scorched-earth on territory that they claim publicly that they want to keep.

For now, there’s little to be done except watch the water as it drains away. Kuns isn’t sure what the purpose of it is. “But it is very worrying.”