Ukraine says the concrete and steel shell protecting a destroyed nuclear reactor at Chernobyl was damaged in a Russian drone strike overnight. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says the strike with a high-explosive warhead caused a fire that has now been extinguished, but radiation levels at the site have not increased, the BBC reports. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which has personnel at the site, said the inner containment shell at Reactor No. 4 was not breached.
Russia denied responsibility for the strike, which came hours before a security conference in Munich, where Zelensky is expected to speak to Trump administration officials about negotiations to end the war, the New York Times reports.
- "There is no talk about strikes on nuclear infrastructure, nuclear energy facilities, any such claim isn't true, our military doesn't do that," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. The AP reports that he suggested, without evidence, that Ukraine made the claim about a Russian strike to derail negotiations between Vladimir Putin and President Trump.
- In a post on Telegram, Zelensky argued that "Putin is certainly not preparing for negotiations." "The only state in the world that can attack such facilities, occupy the territory of nuclear power plants, and conduct hostilities without any regard for the consequences is today's Russia," he said. "And this is a terrorist threat to the entire world,"
- The structure hit by a drone was completed in 2016. It covers a "sarcophagus" over the reactor that was put in place after the 1986 nuclear disaster, the Times reports. Andriy Yermak, head of the presidential office in Ukraine, said the world helped what was then the Soviet Union after the worst nuclear accident in history. "Then the whole world invested in the shelter, and today these Russian idiots have launched a drone at it," he said.
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