Damage to the shelter preventing radiation leaking from the remains of Chernobyl’s Reactor 4, Ukraine, 14 February 2025. Photo: EPA-EFE / IAEA
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has branded Russia “a terrorist threat to the whole world” after the Russian military attacked the protective sarcophagus built over the highly radioactive remains of Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant north of Kyiv early on Friday morning.
Zelensky said that Moscow had struck the facility using a drone fitted with high explosives, causing significant damage to the sarcophagus and causing a fire to break out, though he added that it had been quickly brought under control.
“The only state in the world that could attack such facilities, occupy the territory of nuclear power plants and wage war without taking its consequences into account at all, is today’s Russia,” Zelensky said, warning that the strike was evidence that Putin had no intention of “preparing for negotiations” and would instead “continue to deceive the world”.
Though preliminary reports suggested the damage to the sarcophagus was significant, the Ukrainian emergency services reported that background radiation at the site remained within permitted levels.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed that a drone had struck the sarcophagus, and that staff who had been working at the site had heard an explosion and seen flames early on Friday morning.
From Munich, Andriy Yermak, the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, accused Russia of deliberately targeting the sarcophagus, which is known by the name the New Safe Confinement (NSC), and added that delegates to the Munich Security Conference had been incensed by the attack.
“The whole world helped the Kremlin to deal with the effects of the disaster in the 1980s. As Moscow sent people into the radiation unprotected, Gorbachev was given robots, equipment and specialists. The whole world invested in building the sarcophagus, but today those Russian assholes launched a drone at it,” Yermak said.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov denied that a Russian drone had struck Chernobyl, according to state-owned news agency TASS, insisting simply that “the Russian military doesn’t do such things”.
Completed with assistance from the US and Europe in 2019 and intended to seal the remains of Reactor 4 for 100 years, the NSC is a massive steel and concrete structure that was commissioned to replace the original sarcophagus built immediately after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.
Chernobyl’s Reactor 4 exploded on 26 April 1986, causing one the worst nuclear accidents the world has ever seen. Russian troops briefly occupied the plant in the early days of the war before Ukrainian forces regained control of the mothballed complex in March 2022.
