Global Courant 2023-05-10 18:42:37
Russia plans to relocate about 2,700 Ukrainian personnel from Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, the Ukrainian nuclear power company said on Wednesday, warning of a possible “catastrophic lack of qualified personnel” at its Zaporizhzhia facility in Russian-occupied southern Ukraine.
Workers who signed labor contracts with Russia’s Rosatom nuclear agency after Moscow’s capture of the Zaporizhzhia plant at the start of the war will be taken to Russia along with their families, Energoatom said in a Telegram post.
Energoatom did not specify whether the workers would be forcibly evicted from the plant, nor was it immediately possible to verify Energoatom’s claims about Moscow’s plan.
Removing staff would “exacerbate the already extremely pressing problem of labor shortages,” Energoatom said.
Evacuation order
The Moscow-installed governor of the region last Saturday ordered the evacuation of civilians from the area, including from the nearby town of Enerhodar, where most of the factory workers live. The full scope of the evacuation order was not clear.
Fighting near the plant has fueled fears of a potentially catastrophic incident like the one at Chernobyl, in northern Ukraine, where a reactor exploded in 1986, spewing deadly radiation, contaminating a vast area in the worst nuclear accident in history. world.
Zaporizhzhia is one of the 10 largest nuclear power plants in the world. Although its six reactors have been shut down for months, it still needs power and qualified personnel to operate critical cooling systems and other safety features.
Members of a delegation from the International Atomic Energy Agency visit the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant on March 29. (Andrey Borodulin/AFP/Getty Images)
Kremlin-installed authorities in the Zaporizhzhia region are accelerating efforts to relocate local residents, including families of workers at the factory, over an expected Ukrainian counter-offensive, officials in Kiev said.
Moved to South Russia
Military analysts say Ukraine could direct its counter-offensive towards the Zaporizhzhia region in an attempt to split Russia’s forces in two by pushing on to the coast of the Sea of Azov in the south.
Relatives of factory workers in Zaporizhia who agreed to move were taken to Russia’s southern Rostov region and placed in temporary camps, Ukraine’s general staff said.
It said factory workers are currently not allowed to leave Enerhodar. It made no mention of the alleged Russian plan referred to by Energoatom.
Ukraine’s National Resistance Center, which says it directs and coordinates Ukrainian partisan movements in territory occupied by Russian troops, says Russian-installed officials in Zaporizhzhia are closing schools, preparing buses and appointing officials to oversee the evacuation process.
They claim that the trial is largely aimed at children.
In March, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Russian leader Vladimir Putin for war crimes, accusing him and Russia’s Ombudsman for Children of personal responsibility for the abduction of minors from Ukraine.
At the time, Ukraine’s human rights chief, Dmytro Lubinets, said 16,226 Ukrainian children had been forcibly taken to Russia, citing data from the Ukrainian National Information Agency.
‘Seriously Compromised’
After taking over Zaporizhzhia, the Russians left the Ukrainian workforce to keep the factory running, but the exact number of employees currently working at the factory is not known. The United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), did not immediately respond to an Associated Press question about the workforce.
However, the IAEA said shortly after Russian forces entered the plant following its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, that a low workforce “seriously compromised” one of the fundamental factors of nuclear safety and security, namely that “operating personnel are unable to to fulfill their safety and security duties and have the capacity to make decisions without undue pressure.”
The IAEA has deployed a handful of personnel to Zaporizhzhia to ensure security.
