Moscow-appointed mayor of Ukrainian city injured in blast: reports

The mayor of Ukraine’s southern city of Enerhodar, which is home to Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, was injured in an explosion on Sunday, according to a Ukrainian official and Russian news agencies.

Andrey Shevchik was appointed mayor of Enerhodar after Russian troops took control of the city and the nearby Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant on February 24 as part of Moscow’s military campaign in Ukraine.

“We have accurate confirmation that during the explosion the self-proclaimed head of the ‘people’s administration’ Shevchik and his bodyguards were injured,” Dmytro Orlov, the elected mayor of Enerhodar, said on Telegram.

He added that they were in hospital “with injuries of varying severity” but the circumstances of the case were still being established.

Nobody else was injured in the blast, he added.

Citing a source in emergency services, Russian news agency RIA Novosti said that Shevchik was in intensive care, while according to a source in law enforcement of TASS news agency, the blast was caused by an “improvised explosive device”.

Enerhodar, a city of about 50,000 people, was built in the 1970s to serve the local power plants. Its nuclear power plant is located on the opposite bank of the Dnipro River from the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia.

In the early days of the conflict, clashes erupted at the plant, raising fears of a nuclear disaster in a country where a nuclear reactor exploded at the Chernobyl plant in 1986.