- Russian President Vladiir Putin agrees to allow inspectors to visit the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant.
- Fighting near the site has raised the prospect of a disaster worse than Chernobyl.
- A US defense official says Ukraine’s forces have halted the Russian advance.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has agreed to allow independent inspectors to visit the Moscow-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, The French presidency announced Friday as fears grow about fighting near the site.
The apparent resolution of a disagreement over whether inspectors should travel through Ukraine or Russia came as a US defense official said Ukraine’s forces had halted the Russian advance.
“You are seeing a complete and total lack of progress by the Russians on the battlefield,” the official said, speaking on grounds of anonymity.
Putin had “reconsidered” his demand that the International Atomic Energy Agency travel through Russia to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear site, according to the office of French President Emmanuel Macron.
Rafael Grossi, the head of the UN nuclear watchdog, “welcomed recent statements indicating that both Ukraine and Russia supported the IAEA’s goal of sending a mission to” the plant.
Meanwhile, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged Moscow’s occupying forces in Zaporizhzhia not to disconnect the facility from the grid, potentially cutting off supplies to millions of Ukrainians.
A resurgence of fighting near the Russian-controlled nuclear power plant, with both sides blaming each other for attacks, has raised the prospect of a disaster worse than Chernobyl.
The Kremlin said that Putin and Macron agreed that the IAEA should carry out inspections “as soon as possible” to “assess the real situation on the ground.”
Putin also “stressed that the systematic shelling of the territory of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant by the Ukrainian military creates the risk of a large-scale catastrophe,” according to the Kremlin.
The warning came just a day after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who were meeting in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, raised the alarm about the fighting, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged the UN to secure the site.
“This summer may go down in the history of various European countries as one of the most tragic of all time,” Zelensky said in his Friday evening address.
“No instruction at any nuclear power plant in the world provides a procedure in case a terrorist state turns a nuclear power plant into a target.”
