Donbass
Donbass
Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant re-connected
Kyiv/Vienna/Hague/Beijing/Moscow: As Ukraine fights a bloody battle for survival on the 21st day of the war against the Russian invaders, its head of the Regional Military Administration said today that over the last 24 hours, Russian troops had made more than 50 artillery/aviation strikes against Kharkiv, the second-largest city and municipality in Ukraine. The city continues to defend itself, he claimed, where the Russian artillery hit a residential building, and set a neighbouring kindergarten on fire.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov vowed to finish Ukraine’s dominance in Donbass – the centre of the present conflict. Lavrov claimed that during his meeting with Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian in Moscow yesterday, the Iranian minister spoke to him about the phone call he had with the Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba. “He (Amir-Abdollahian) conveyed to me Dmitry Kuleba’s wish that we need to “stop the war” as soon as possible. This is exactly what we are doing – we are stopping the war that the Kyiv regime has been waging against the population of Donbass for the past eight years or more. This war must stop. Especially now, when once again we can see the true face of the radical nationalists in Kyiv. Yesterday, they used Tochka-U systems to fire cluster munitions at the centre of Donetsk killing 20 and injuring even more civilians. All these facts are being hushed up in the West, which continues to whip up hysteria by spreading patent fake news,” Lavrov told journalists in Moscow.
Meanwhile, Ukraine informed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) had been re-connected to the national electricity grid and no longer relied on emergency diesel generators for power, Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said.
The site of the 1986 accident lost all off-site power on March 9, 2022, and was forced to resort to diesel fuel for backup electricity. Ukrainian specialist teams succeeded on the weekend to repair one of two damaged lines linking the plant to the power network.
From 16:45 CET on March 14, 2022, this line has been providing all the required power to the NPP and the diesel generators have been switched off, Ukraine’s regulatory authority said today. It is also supplying electricity to the nearby city of Slavutich. It remains unclear whether it will be possible to repair the second high-voltage power line, the regulator added.
Also read: Radiation levels in Ukrainian nuclear plants in normal range: IAEA
Russian forces took control of the Chornobyl NPP on February 24, but its Ukrainian staff have continued to manage day-to-day operations at the site, where various radioactive waste management facilities are located.
Nuclear safety and security in Ukraine had also topped the agenda of the eighth EU-IAEA Senior Officials Meeting in Vienna yesterday. At the annual meeting, which was postponed since 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the European Union (EU) Special Envoy for Non-proliferation and Disarmament, Marjolijn van Deelen, conveyed the EU’s “grave concern over the growing nuclear safety and security risks in Ukraine, as a result of Russia’s military aggression and indiscriminate attacks on several nuclear sites”. Deelen reaffirmed the EU’s full support for the initiative of IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi to ensure the safety and security of all nuclear facilities in Ukraine.
In the meantime, both Russia and China accused the United States of America of developing toxic chemicals in the West and in Ukraine in particular.
Russian foreign ministry published on its official website the translated statement by Ambassador Shulgin, Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) at the 99th Session of the Executive Council, General Debate in Hague, wherein he had claimed that it was known with “absolute certainty” that research and development of new types of toxic chemicals – including so-called “novichoks” – continued in the laboratories of a full range of Western countries. Shulgin had made this statement on March 8, 2022.
Picking up the cue, China today stated that the US has the obligation to comply with the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) and to offer clarifications on matters the international community is concerned about. “In fact, the international community has long-held severe concerns about the biological military activities conducted by the US at home and overseas. This is neither about US labs in Ukraine alone nor a new problem caused by the current situation,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian told reporters in Beijing today.
Earlier, Beijing accused the US embassy in Ukraine of deleting certain documents from its website that it claimed were about the labs that had a military purpose.
“I want to stress that the concerns of the international community about US’ biological labs in Ukraine boil down to what the US has done and what has been hidden from the public. Why is the US the only party that is opposed to establishing a BWC verification regime? Why not open these bio-labs to an independent investigation by international experts?” Lijian stated yesterday.
Meanwhile, as the war continues, Ukraine’s Ministry of Health today claimed the Russians had damaged 117 hospitals, 7 of which were destroyed completely. In addition, the Ministry claimed, the occupiers fired on 43 ambulances.
Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova stated today that since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, at least 103 children had died and more than 100 have been injured. Venediktova said these were “verified information”, and suggested that the real numbers were likely much higher.
Since the beginning of the invasion, Ukraine’s Minister of Internal Affairs stated today that Russia had completely or partially destroyed 3500 infrastructure objects (among them – 230 transport infrastructure sites, 165 civilian infrastructure objects such as gas lines etc., dozens of educational and health institutions).
– global bihari bureau
