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KIIV, Ukraine (AP) – Renewed Moscow attacks against Ukrainian force infrastructure this winter have hooked the breach of the Ukraine force of the force of Ukraine to protect the bunnings of maximum critical force of the country near nuclear sites.
Despite more than a year of warnings that the sites were vulnerable to possible Russian attacks, the Ministry of Energy acted quickly, the existing and previous Ukrainian officials of kyiv to Associated Press.
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Two years of punishing Russian movements in their electric power network have left Ukraine depending on the nuclear force for more from its electricity production. Unprotected nuclear switches are vulnerable located outside the doors, the perimeters of their 3 operational nuclear force plants, which must transmit the force of the reactors to the rest of the country.
“The switches that handle the electrical routing of the plants of the nuclear force are a component of the nuclear force infrastructure of Ukraine: Network nuclear home, a program of the NGO Pax Sapiens based in the US the reduction of nuclear threats.
“Given the greatest dependence on Ukraine with respect to nuclear energy, army attacks opposed to those lands would have an effect on civil life and have an effect on civil life and compress the resilience of the power network” array she said .
Only in autumn, after Ukrainian intelligence agencies warned opposite to possible Russian movements aimed at nuclear lands, taken to begin the coverage of the structure, too passed through the attack, analysts said.
“If two (nuclear gardens) are affected, we are out of source for at least 30 to 36 hours, and there will be a massive limitation of the energy source for at least 3 weeks, the case,” said Oleksandr Kharchenko, an expert on Ukraine’s energy industry.
He said it would take three to five weeks to transport and install new equipment, a miserable scenario for Ukraine’s people during the bitterly cold winter months.
Even more worryingly, nuclear highways also have a critical function for the time being: delivering electrical power to nuclear power plants from the off-site grid that is imperative to cool their reactors and expend fuel. An outage can potentially explain a catastrophe, the United Nations nuclear firm has warned since Russian attacks began in August.
And while Ukraine’s nuclear power plants have backup emergency systems, they “are designed to provide transient support,” Fowler said. “Without functional switches, backup systems alone would not be enough to maintain operations or spare safety hazards a lengthy outage. “
Lawmakers cited failure to protect these sites in a resolution last month calling for the removal of Energy Minister Herman Haluschenko. The list of grievances, which also censured Haluschenko for alleged systematic corruption and inadequate oversight of the energy sector, must still be voted on by parliament.
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Hauschenko held at a press convention on Tuesday that the accusations were “handling” and that the fortifications for the electric power network were “made. ” But it would not respond directly on whether the Ukrainian nuclear switches in specific were protected.
Russian attacks in November and December came dangerously close to the country’s nuclear power plants, causing five out of its nine operating reactors to reduce power generation. The attacks did not strike the nuclear switchyards about a kilometer (half-mile) away from reactor sites but came alarmingly close.
The task of building protections for energy transmission substations, both nuclear and non-nuclear, fell to state and private companies, with the Energy Ministry supervising.
Three layers of fortifications were ordered: sandbags followed through cement barricades capable of resisting drone attacks and, the maximum and less whole structures, made of iron and steel.
Following a government decree in July 2023, many of the state’s force corporations began contracting without delay to build first- and second-layer fortifications for their maximum critical force facilities. In the spring of 2024, the government repeated the pressing call to get the task done.
But nuclear switchyards, under the responsibility of Ukraine’s state nuclear company Energoatom, did not issue contracts to build second-layer concrete fortifications until this fall. By then, state energy company Ukrenergo, which manages the high-voltage substations that transmit power from the nuclear reactors to the grid, had already completed 90% of its 43 sites.
The Tfinisher procedure for two nuclear force plants, in Khmelnytskyi and Mykolavi, only began in early October, according to the documents noted through the AP. The call to the Tfinishers for the Rivne nuclear force plant even later, at the end of November.
The structure is not ended before 2026, according to the contract documents.
Concerns over the delays were raised repeatedly in closed-door meetings and letters sent to energy officials over the last year, three current and former government officials told the AP, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the foot-dragging by the Energy Ministry.
“We have officially written to the Ministry of Energy several times indicating this challenge for more than 12 to 14 months,” said Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, a former head of Ukrenerg, which fired in September and blamed the energy infrastructure for the mess on Shield, a move widely criticized as politically motivated.
The Minister of Energy, Hauschenko, said the scenario was low and gave priority to other projects, in a specific lobbying for the parliamentary approval of the structure of the nuclear reactors that take up to a decade to build.
Ukraine’s Western partners were also repeatedly told “all” critical infrastructure was protected, according to two Western diplomats with knowledge of Western financial assistance to the country’s energy sector, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the issue.
Energoatom did not respond to requests for comment from the AP about the delays, citing the sensitivity of the issue.
Over the summer and again in December, Ukraine raised the alarm internationally about potential Russian attacks targeting nuclear infrastructure and compromising nuclear safety. In mid-December it convened an extraordinary session of the International Atomic Energy Agency after attacks a month earlier damaged electrical substations deemed crucial to Ukraine’s nuclear safety, heightening the possibility of a nuclear emergency.
The U.N. nuclear agency sent teams in December to electrical substations at Ukraine’s Khmelnytskyi, Rivne, and South Ukraine nuclear power plants to document damage and gathered evidence “highlighting the electricity grid’s vulnerabilities as a result of attacks,” the agency’s Director General Rafael Grossi said in a statement in January.
“These attacks have an effect on the stability of the network and compromise the reliability of food outside the site, creating dangers for nuclear safety,” said gross considerations similar to the Zaporizhzhia factory owned by Russia, the largest in Europe.
The presence of the IAEA inspection teams led some in the Ukrainian government to believe the country’s nuclear sites were off-limits for Russian attacks, said a senior Ukrainian official who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the delays.
But that has proven to be a major miscalculation.
“Why didn’t they react?” Kudrytskyi, former director of Ukrenergo, said about the inability of the Ministry of Energy to temporarily respond to the precautionary series. “I don’t have an answer to this. “
AP journalists David Rising in Bangkok and Volodymyr Yurchuk in Kyiv contributed to this report.
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