Ukraine says Russian drone damages radiation shield at Chernobyl

KYIV, Ukraine – Russia’s military used a drone with a high-explosive warhead to hit the former Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine overnight, damaging the protective shelter that prevents radiation leaks, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine said Friday.

In a post on social media, Zelenskyy called the damage “significant” but said that there were no signs of increased radiation at the plant, the site of the worst nuclear accident in history. Denys Shmyhal, the Ukrainian prime minister, said Friday morning that emergency crews had extinguished a fire at the site. A Kremlin spokesperson denied that Russia had attacked the plant.

The structure that was damaged was designed to seal in vast quantities of radioactive isotopes from the fire and meltdown in 1986 at Chernobyl’s Reactor No. 4, and was intended to last generations.

The strike comes as pressure grows on Ukraine and Russia to sit down at the bargaining table three years after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion. It also comes as world leaders are gathered in Munich for an annual security conference where the war in Ukraine – and recent statements by President Donald Trump and his team indicating that they want to pursue a quick peace deal – will probably dominate conversations.

Many attending the Munich conference will remember the radioactive clouds that spread over parts of Europe after the accident at Chernobyl, which happened when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. The accident was initially covered up by Soviet authorities.

“Now the atmosphere is such that everyone is very angry about this news here in Munich,” Andriy Yermak, head of the presidential office in Ukraine, posted on social media. “Not ‘concerned,’ as is often the case, but really angry.”

Yermak noted that the whole world had helped the Kremlin rebuild after Chernobyl. “Then the whole world invested in the shelter, and today these Russian idiots have launched a drone at it,” he added.

The Kremlin denied that Russia’s military had struck the plant. Its spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said, “The Russian military does not do this.”

“Most likely, we are talking about provocation and fraud,” he added.

The structure at Chernobyl that was hit Friday is a huge arching shelter covering what remains of the crippled reactor. The meltdown spewed radiation into the atmosphere and contaminated an 18-mile zone around the plant that residents were forced to leave.

The protective structure, which resembles an aircraft hangar, was completed in 2016. It covers another structure, known as the sarcophagus, that was built immediately after the disaster.

The exploding drone breached the outer shield but did not damage the older, interior containment structure, Leontiy Derkach, a radiological engineer at the site, said in a telephone interview.

The explosion sprayed shrapnel into the space between the two structures, damaging both, he said, but did not spread radioactive materials. Emergency crews responded at about 3 a.m., he said, as the fire still burned.

The first people to approach the site were workers with radiation meters, to ascertain if radiation was leaking, he said. “We are not kamikazes to immediately go into the danger zone,” he said.

Air samples determined no radiation was leaking, Derkach said. Ukrainian military chemists and radiation specialists are still working at the site to gain a fuller picture of the damage. By around noon, he said, crews had not yet entered the outer containment structure for a closer view.

The drone, he said, had hit about 60 yards from where protective plates covered highly radioactive debris from the 1986 accident. Had it hit at that location, he said, the exploding drone could have spread radiation at least inside the outer containment structure.

Emergency crews, Derkach said, were assessing how to repair the hole. “The Russians caused us great damage,” he said. “The whole world built this shelter and the Russians destroyed it in one second.”

Greenpeace, the conservation group, issued a statement about the strike on the Chernobyl plant, saying it was “a further escalation of the threat to Ukraine’s nuclear power plants and must be condemned and punished.”

Chernobyl was among the first locations targeted in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, as the Russian army captured and occupied the decommissioned plant and used the site as a base for attacks on Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, about two hours to the south.

Radiation levels rose for several days, most likely from columns of heavy weaponry stirring dust. During the monthlong occupation of the site, Russian soldiers dug trenches in irradiated soil, and electrical power to a cooling pool for nuclear waste was briefly cut, raising alarms.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said that its staff members at the site of the former nuclear plant had heard the explosion overnight.

The strike on Chernobyl and the recent increase in military activity around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in a Russian-occupied zone “underline persistent nuclear safety risks,” said Rafael Grossi, the agency’s director-general.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.