Russia ‘planning attacks from Chernobyl exclusion zone after looting radiation lab’

Ukraine has accused Russia of plotting attacks from the site of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, having ‘looted and destroyed’ a lab containing radioactive samples.

Putin’s forces seized Chernobyl at the start of his invasion and were said to have taken its hundreds of staff hostage.

The plant has to be carefully managed to avoid further nuclear disasters like the meltdown of 1986 and is said to contain state-of-the-art equipment unique across Europe.

The ransacked Central Analytical Laboratory was used to process radioactive waste from the exclusion zone around the plant.

Ukrainian officials in charge of the zone said it contained ‘highly active samples and samples of radionuclides that are now in the hands of the enemy, which we hope will harm itself and not the civilised world’.

Radiation monitors around the plant stopped working on Monday, they added.

Strilets Ruslan, Ukraine’s natural resources minister, said wildfires had broken out near Chernobyl’s reactor and that Russian troops were hampering Ukrainian firefighters trying to put them out.

President Zelensky did not detail the intelligence behind the warnings of a Russian strike from the site, but said: ‘The world is on the verge of many new crises. The environmental and food challenges are unprecedented.’

He was speaking to Japanese MPs via video-link, thought to the first time in Japan’s history a foreign leader has been given such an audience.

Mr Zelensky thanked Prime Minister Fumio Kishida for leading the way among Asian governments in condemning Putin, urging him to ramp up Japan’s sanctions with an all-out trade ban against Russia.

Japan has so far imposed individual sanctions on 76 Russian politicians and military officials as well as seven banks and 12 institutions including its state-owned arms exporting agency.

He appealed to the two countries’ shared experience nuclear disasters, likening Ukraine’s painful history with Chernobyl to the devastating meltdowns and explosions that wrecked the area around Fukushima nuclear power plant in 2011.

The president added: ‘I urge you to unite the efforts of the Asian states, your partners, in order to stabilise the situation, so that Russia seeks peace and stops the tsunami of its harsh invasion.’

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