WARSAW — Russian forces have stored “dozens of thousands of tons” of ammunition near the infamous Chernobyl nuclear facility near Kyiv, according to Ukrainian officials who claim that Russia regards the area as a safe zone despite the risk of a disastrous accident.
“They use this nuclear facility as an umbrella because they understand that Ukrainians will not attack them there,” Oleksandr Danilyuk, a national security official for the central government in Kyiv, told the Washington Examiner.
That tactical choice has made it easier to conduct some military operations around Kyiv, the target of one of the main prongs of the Russian military campaign over the last month. And yet, that relative security against Ukrainian attacks comes at the cost of a “huge, huge risk” to Chernobyl and the $2.5 billion confinement shelter designed to contain a destroyed nuclear reactor and “radioactive dust” and debris left behind from the 1986 disaster.
“So the transportation route of this ammunition is literally, like, maybe, 300 meters from the shelter and the final destination, the final storage is less than 20 kilometers from the shelter,” said Danilyuk, a security official not to be confused with former Ukrainian Finance Minister Oleksandr Danylyuk. “And the quantity of that ammunition is big enough to say that this risk makes that accident and destroying of that shelter almost imminent.”
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The threat of a nuclear disaster has loomed over the war in the last month as Russian forces moved to seize Chernobyl and other facilities in the course of their offensive. International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Grossi is traveling in Ukraine to coordinate the “planned delivery of urgent technical assistance to ensure the safety and security of the country’s nuclear facilities,” but Ukrainian officials want the United Nations Security Council to intervene.
“We demand that the UN Security Council immediately take measures to demilitarize the Chernobyl exclusion zone and introduce a special UN mission there to eliminate the risk of the repeat of a nuclear catastrophe,” Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vereschuk said Wednesday.
The Chernobyl site carries additional strategic significance given its place on the route from Belarus, which Russia used as a staging area to attack Kyiv. Russia, which wields a veto on the Security Council, said this week that it would scale back military operations around Kyiv, but that announcement was followed by renewed shelling around Kyiv and Chernihiv, another city in the region.
“They’re trying to use the positions they already captured as a defense line and to attack Kyiv … to force Ukraine to keep significant forces in the area, instead of sending them to Donbas to help our formation in Donbas,” Danilyuk said. “And this is another point why the Russians need that ammunition in the area.”
The makeshift depot includes artillery munitions, according to Danilyuk, who cited the presence of truck-mounted BM-21 “GRAD” rockets and the longer-range Uragan and Smerch armaments.
“Any accident on that storage would create a huge problem for all of the Chernobyl zone,” he said.
An accident at a Russian arms depot near Moscow last year forced the evacuation of a reported 2,300 Russian civilians. “A gusty wind spread the fire to the artillery ammunition storage site,” Russian military officials said to explain the October incident, according to Russian state media.
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Danilyuk surmised that lax training and “very old” explosives could make for a combustible situation.
“It’s not just about storing that ammunition, very often they have the problems during transportation,” he said. “Additionally, they have so many just stupid conscripts who have no idea how to protect ammunition, who just smoke [around the ammo]. I’m not kidding, this is the reality.”
