By Abbey Makoe
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has to stop everything in their in-tray and rush to the battlefield in Russia’s Kursk region, where thousands of Ukrainian soldiers are wreaking havoc and reportedly posing a grave threat to the nuclear facility.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin revealed during a cabinet meeting in Moscow on Thursday that his army had successfully repelled an attempted attack on the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant by the marauding Ukrainian forces.
The incursion by thousands of Ukrainian soldiers in the Kursk region – which enters a fourth week – has sent shivers and has resulted in more 100 000 citizens being rescued and taken to temporary safe zones inland.
“Last night,” President Putin told his concerned cabinet, “the enemy attempted to strike the atomic power plant. The International Atomic Energy Agency has been informed. They promised to come themselves and send specialists to assess the situation. I hope they actually do so.”
The IAEA has also wasted no time in expressing grave concern over the safety of the Kursk NPP. The director of the IAEA, Rafael Grossi, said his concerns were made particularly dire by the fact that the Kursk NPP “operates the same kind of reactors as the infamous Chernobyl NPP”.
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Grossi explained: “They don’t have a protective dome around them, just the normal roof, which means that the reactor’s core is pretty exposed.” He added that the continued presence of troops within artillery range “is a source of enormous concern to me and the agency”, she said, stopping short of revealing the identity of the forces he was referring to.
Moscow has repeatedly criticized the IAEA for never identifying the perpetrator of attacks on nuclear facilities, referring to previous attacks at the Zaporizhzhia NPP – Europe’s largest such facility which is situated in Ukraine and has been under Russian control since 2022.
The Kremlin feels that the IAEA should publicly name the Ukrainian forces as the perpetrators and constant threats to the safety of the nuclear power plants.
This week, the CEO of Russia’s nuclear facilities at Rosatom, Alexey Likhachev, confirmed that he too had held urgent talks with the IAEA’s boss Grossi about the attempt on the Kursk NPP.
He revealed that Grossi had accepted his personal invitation to urgently visit the Kursk NPP to assess the situation in person. Grossi will visit the nuclear facility next week, after which he will visit the Ukrainian capital Kiev for talks with President Volodymyr Zelensky about the matter.
Ukrainian forces reportedly continue to make inroads inside Russia in the Kursk region, controlling more than 1000 kilometre range of the territory and displacing a growing number of people.
The conflict in Ukraine over deep geopolitical differences between Moscow and the US-led NATO has escalated in the last few weeks, with the Ukrainian forces’ incursion inside the Russian territory a completely new development whose implication in the war is yet to be fully comprehended.
In the midst of it all, NATO’s expansion to Russia’s doorstep is set to continue regardless of Moscow’s misgivings, setting the scene for heightened conflict if a negotiated settlement is not pursued.
In the US and across Europe, as well as Russia and the international community, the outcome of the American elections scheduled to take place on November 6 will dictate which direction the conflict takes.
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Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has already intimated that he will stop the war before he is even inaugurated. However, a Kamala Harries victory will most likely see an emboldened NATO pushing for a full-frontal conflict with Russia which could easily degenerate into a World War III – fought through nuclear weapons and threatening the entire planet.
It is a great pity that communication between Kyiv and Moscow was dealt a big blow when President Zelensky declared that there would be no talks with Russia as long as President Putin was in office.
The increased supply of Western arms to Ukraine, coupled with war-mongering from some of the NATO nation’s leaders, has reduced optimism for peace on the one hand and upped the tempo for Armageddon.
From the beginning of what the Kremlin has described as a Special Military Operation in Ukraine, and NATO has labelled an invasion that poses an existential threat to Ukraine and Western democracies, conflict could have been averted with honest diplomatic engagement.
Instead, the adoption of a gung-ho diplomatic approach by the US and later NATO and the EU that joined en masse in the economic sanctions regime against Moscow has led the world to the brink. This is a great pity indeed. The fact is, Washington would never tolerate Russia opening a military base in Cuba, Mexico, or anywhere adjacent to the US.
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That Russia had been all along polite and civil in raising initial concerns about NATO’s expansion eastwards, and the concerns fell on deaf ears, shows how much Washington had wanted a confrontation with Moscow.
The war-mongering by the outgoing US President Joe Biden, and his administration’s astronomical financing of the Ukrainian military as part of Washington’s proxy war against Russia is very telling and will be analyzed by geopolitical scholars for a very long time.
But back to where we began: any foolish attack on any nuclear facility will never be forgiven by history. The unimaginable deaths that could be caused by radiation from the bombed nuclear facilities will kill scores of innocent men, women and children near and far across Europe.
The price of peace should be pursued at all costs in a world that has globalized in the 21st century where we have all become members of one global village.
Surely, the need to work out a peaceful resolution to the Ukrainian conflict could be achieved once Russia’s security concerns are addressed with the same vigour Washington and NATO show in their defence for what they see as an existential threat to Kyiv.
*Abbey Makoe is Founder and Editor-in-Chief: Global South Media Network