As Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant catches fire in deliberate attack, Irish charity head calls for urgent diplomatic intervention before a ‘humanitarian Armageddon’.

On the night of Sunday, 11 August, a cooling tower at the illegally occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine battled an inferno that ominously billowed heavy, dark smoke over the volatile region.

Both Ukrainian and Russian governments have directed the blame at each other for setting fires, however the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have suggested that a possible deliberate drone strike was the cause of the blaze.

Adi Roche of the Chernobyl Children International (CCI) charity is calling for diplomatic measures to be urgently taken in the hopes of brokering peace as the intensifying nuclear threat is putting the world on the precipice of a ‘humanitarian Armageddon’;

“We cannot overstate the current critical situation and nuclear threat in Ukraine. We must do everything in our power to prevent Zaporizhzhia from becoming the next ‘Chernobyl’. We neglect Ukraine at our peril.”

“We are playing Russian Roulette and our luck is about to run out. We are staring down a barrel of a loaded gun. Any potential explosion or meltdown at Zaporizhzhia, by accident or design, would cause irreversible damage to the environment and human life that will last for thousands of years.”

Roche continued, “It may not even be deliberate – all it would take would be a stray missile or drone in the crossfire with both sides blaming each other. It would be impossible to evacuate from an explosion at Zaporizhzhia because of the fragile state of the ongoing war.”

“The inferno at Zaporizhzhia reflects a worrying trend emanating from this war, where nuclear facilities have been weaponised and brought into the increasingly volatile and unpredictable combat zones, signifying to the world that the nature of modern warfare has changed forever, and brings with it a sense of foreboding for wars of the future.”

The fire at Zaporizhzhia, which has been occupied since the early days of the war, has since been extinguished, with no rise in radiation yet reported. However, as conflicting information is coming from both sides and the IAEA, and no independent verification is possible in the warzone, fears of nuclear fallout continues to escalate.

Since the beginning of the war and the invasion of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in February 2022, CCI have been advocating for all nuclear facilities be deemed a ‘No War Zone’ and for World Leaders to invoke the Hague Convention which defines any attack on a nuclear facility to be a ‘war crime’.