First the good news:
I haven’t seen any reports of more shelling of the complex since the one I wrote up yesterday. (Here, with links to previous write-ups as well.)
There are as yet no reports of any radiation being released; the complex has been able to keep operating.
That being said, reports are the damage to the facility has cut off power for thousands of people in the region. The situation at the complex is not the only thing affecting energy issues across Europe and around the world, given reliance on Russian fossil fuel exports. (Speaking of coal…)
Needless to say, the situation is less than optimum with Russian forces occupying the complex and reportedly using it as a munitions storage site and artillery fire base. The International Atomic Energy Agency warns it can’t monitor operations at the complex and is very concerned about the potential for disaster.
This seems to be getting international attention.
Meanwhile, there’s a flap from an Amnesty International report taking Ukraine to task for allegedly using the civilian population as a shield by placing combat troops and supplies in their midst. The report has been criticized on a number of grounds. Kos discusses the allegations here — an excerpt:
The report has been getting substantive pushback, because it's difficult to see what Ukrainian defenders are supposed to do differently when facing a war of conquest. Russia's intent is to capture these population centers. The population centers are, themselves, the targets of Russia's advances.
Russia intends to capture each city, primarily doing so by using artillery fire to produce such widespread damages as to make those cities unlivable. After capturing cities, Russia has been kidnapping large numbers of Ukrainians—sometimes under the pretense of "rescuing" them, sometimes under no pretense at all—and spiriting them away to concentration camps inside Russia. Reports from liberated Ukrainian cities tell of random civilian executions and other horrific war crimes.
It's impossible to think of a plausible scenario in which Ukrainian defenders could defend those cities from capture without ... urban fighting. There's a difference between hiding among civilians for the explicit purpose of using them as human shields and justified urban defense, and critics don't think the Amnesty International claim differentiates between the two.
HAYDA: Yeah. It's been the talk of the streets for days. There's even a viral meme that the organization might change its name to something like Shamnesty (ph) International. Now, one of the reasons for this is because Russia has been trying to justify its invasion of Ukraine since before it even happened. And Ukrainians are mad that Russian media has really run with this Amnesty report, and they've jumped onto some of those implied conclusions that Ukrainians are all war criminals. I talked to Ilya Lozovsky from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, which just like Amnesty, monitors compliance with international law in Ukraine. He says the Amnesty report was written so clumsily, it borders on negligent.
ILYA LOZOVSKY: God forbid, you know, some explosion in a shelter at a hospital that kills 50 people, the Russians are going to say, well, look, even Amnesty International said the Ukrainians are making us do this.
HAYDA: What's interesting is that Amnesty International itself has reported plenty of cases where Russians have attacked civilian sites without any pretext of returning fire, like the time that the Russians bombed a theater in Mariupol where civilians were sheltering back in March. Ukrainians say there wouldn't have been any dead civilians at all if Russia hadn't invaded in the first place. Ukraine's foreign minister says any suggestion Ukraine provokes attacks is simply untrue and amounts to victim blaming.
The documented Russian record of horrendous acts to date is not a small matter, but using a complex of nuclear reactors to shield weapons launching attacks has the potential to create an exponentially worse situation. There are unconfirmed reports that Russia has taken things a step farther and has mined the complex.
From the Brussels Times:
Russian forces are threatening to deliberately blow up the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, stating that the site is already wired with explosives, according to Energoatom, Ukraine’s state-owned nuclear power station operator.
...Faced with a potential Ukrainian offence against Zaporizhzhia and pushes into the greater Kherson region, Energoatom states that the Russian general in charge of the garrison of the nuclear power plant had made direct threats to cause a major nuclear incident at the site.
“There will either be Russian land, or a scorched desert,” Major General Valery Vasiliev is reported to have told his troops.
Energoatom claims that Ukrainian intelligence services are aware of the fact that Russian forces had rigged the site of the nuclear power plant with explosives.
“As you know, we mined all the important objects of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. And we do not hide this from the enemy,” the occupying Russian general is quoted as saying. “We warned them. The enemy knows that the plant will be either Russian or nobody's.”
This has also been picked up by apteryx2, who has a link to the Energoatom report. As it is apparently in Ukrainian which I can’t translate, read at your own risk. This report from Silkway News describes the commander of the forces occupying the complex as:
...the head of the radiation, chemical and biological protection of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, Major General Valery Vasiliev...
From his job title, it would be presumed that Vasiliev should be fully aware of the consequences of using explosives to destroy the complex, although that may be presuming too much given the competence of Russian generals observed elsewhere.
Obviously, getting independent confirmation of the mining of the complex is problematic and this should only be considered rumor at this point. That being said, the possibility that Russia is prepared to blow up the complex rather than let Ukraine recover it cannot be dismissed given the scorched earth and flattened rubble tactics Russian forces have employed elsewhere.
If true, it’s rather difficult to see how much longer it will be possible to avoid officially designating Russia as a terrorist state.