: This could be another Chernobyl in 2022
Earlier Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Russian forces were attempting to take over Chernobyl. After months of threats, Russia this week invaded Ukraine, launching attacks on multiple cities.
“Our defenders are giving their lives so that the tragedy of 1986 will not be repeated,” Zelenskyy tweeted. “This is a declaration of war against the whole of Europe.”
The prime minister later confirmed that Russia was successful in seizing Chernobyl, which is north of the capital city of Kyiv.
“The Chernobyl zone – the exclusion zone – and all installations of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant have been taken under control of Russian armed groups,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said in a televised statement.
. In recent months, Russia has amassed roughly 130,000 troops and military equipment near the Ukrainian border, raising the tension and worries of a possible larger scale invasion into Ukraine. Ukraine has been at war with Russia for almost 8 years now, when in 2014 Russia annexed Crimea and launched the conflict in eastern Ukraine by fuelling separatist sentiments, sending troops and supporting pro-Russian forces.
The United Nations has estimated that about 4,000 people may have died as a result of radiation exposure from the accident at the plant, which was under the control of the Soviet Union at the time.
“For the first time since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster – after which Ukraine has been protecting, together with our European and American friends and allies, the world from another nuclear disaster – we have to defend it again from the Russian forces,” Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States, Oksana Markarova, said during a press briefing.
US News