UN to hold emergency meeting on Ukraine nuclear crisis

The UN Security Council will hold an emergency meeting today to address the crisis at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear complex. Kyiv and Moscow accuse each other of having bombed over the power plant. Bombings on Tuesday night left at least 14 people dead in southeastern Ukraine near the power plant, the largest in Europe.

According to media reports, the meeting would occur on 1900 GMT. A second diplomatic source at United Nations headquarters in New York said the council’s 15 member nations would gather at the request of Russia, one of the five permanent members of the Security Council — along with Britain, China, France and the United States — which hold veto power over UN resolutions.

The G7 group of most industrialized nations warned yesterday that Moscow’s military operation of the plant “endangers the region,” and called for return of the facility to Ukrainian control.

The UN nuclear safety watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said in a statement that its Director General Rafael Grossi would brief the Security Council meeting “about the nuclear safety and security situation” at the plant as well as his “efforts to agree and lead an IAEA expert mission to the site as soon as possible.

The IAEA said his briefing would detail how shelling at the site last week “breached virtually all the seven indispensable nuclear safety and security pillars” that Grossi outlined at the beginning of the conflict.

The tensions have brought back memories of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in then-Soviet Ukraine, which killed hundreds of people and spread radioactive contamination over much of Europe.