Hundreds of thousands of civilians remain near the plant «The Russians are bombing all the time. We are too poor to escape “
“The Russians are hiding in the nuclear power plant and bombing us every night.” So says Igor from the balcony of his house while he looks for videos on his mobile to show us. He tells of seeing the trails of the shots start and to count three or four seconds before they arrive in Nikopol. Of the approximately one hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants, perhaps fifty thousand remain, “but others are leaving because the attacks have now intensified and people are afraid of a nuclear disaster.” There is no one on the sixth floor of the building where Igor lives, all the apartments are empty. The building was hit by a missile a few days ago. From his balcony you can see clearly the six reactors of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant – the largest in Europe – located on the banks of the Dnipro river in the town of Energodar occupied by the Russian army at the beginning of March. He calls his wife to ask where the potassium iodide tablets are to show us – radiation drugs distributed by the city administration to the whole population -, says that if something were to happen they would be useless, and probably they would not even have the time to escape.
In the building opposite Svitlana, sitting on her bed, despairs and cries, her daughter’s house was bombed two days ago and her two-month-old son died. Vitaly watches her as she smokes on the balcony of the apartment they rent. From the window protected with adhesive tape attached to x, you can see the river and the nuclear power plant in the background. The woman is unable to calm down, she curses the Russians, the war, the nightmare of radiation which is the thing that scares her the most and she no longer even believes in the Ukrainian army. Her husband tells her to stop, but she screams and waves her hands. We ask her why they do not try to leave the city as many do, she tells us that they would not know where to go and that they would not have enough money to survive. Her husband is a bus driver and she doesn’t work.
Vitaly accompanies us to the landing, before leaving she points to a stool in the corridor next to the door of the house, on the ground there is a pack of cigarettes and many burnt butts: it is there that she spends sleepless nights during the bombings. The military press officer of the city informs us of the ban for everyone to go to the river bank because the beaches are mined, while on the other side, just four kilometers away, there are Russian artillery positions. In the city, he says, an emergency plan had been prepared in the event of a nuclear disaster, but he did not consider the war. Finally, he escorts us with his car to the checkpoint at the southern entrance of the city, our visit time is up.
Back in Zaporizhzhia we meet Ivan, a worker at the Energodar nuclear power plant, who fled from there last June. He says he left with his family at five in the morning and passed through four Russian checkpoints – the journey took seventeen hours – cwith endless expectations, tensions and humiliations suffered by the military. He continues: “During the occupation of the nuclear power plant, the Russians immediately banned photographs and videos, confiscated cell phones that were never returned.”
Russia and Ukraine blame each other for the bombings that took place near the plant in the last two weeks, Ivan claims that the attacks come exclusively from the Russians who are trying to destroy the electricity connection and distribution networks. About a fifth of the country’s total energy comes from the Zaporizhzhia plant, according to the Ukrainian the Russians intend to disconnect the plant from the Kiev grid and redistribute the electricity produced on the Russian grid – at the moment, however, there is no infrastructure necessary for this to happen – thereby doing very serious damage to Ukraine.
The international tension is very high, in these days there was an invitation by the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres to stop all military activities in the immediate vicinity of the plant and the exhortation for an urgent demilitarization of the area to guarantee area security. Furthermore, the specter of a nuclear accident could cause the flight of a further multitude of refugees, about four hundred thousand, from the Zaporizhzhia area.
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