WESTERN PERSPECTIVE

Ukrainian drone struck Russian nuclear waste facility risking disaster, Moscow says

A Ukrainian drone crashed into a nuclear waste storage facility at the Kursk power plant in western Russia on Thursday, damaging its walls, Russia's foreign ministry said on Saturday, calling on other governments to condemn "an act of nuclear terrorism".

A ministry statement said Ukraine must have known that its actions could have caused a full-scale nuclear catastrophe that would have affected many countries.

"We call on all governments to issue a strong condemnation of Kyiv's barbaric actions, which are extremely dangerous and could lead to irreparable consequences," said foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova.

Russia and Ukraine, which both operate nuclear power plants, have regularly accused each other of risking a nuclear calamity with irresponsible attacks, and the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog - the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) - has been monitoring the situation in Ukraine particularly closely.

Moscow said on Friday that it had thwarted Thursday's drone attack and two news outlets said an explosion had damaged the facade of a warehouse storing nuclear waste. Saturday's statement was the first official confirmation of the damage.

Zakharova said one explosive-packed drone had damaged the nuclear waste facility's walls while another two had hit an administrative building complex.

"According to preliminary data, the drones used in the attack on the nuclear power plant used components supplied by Western countries," she said, adding that such an attack must have had the permission of Ukraine's allies or possibly been ordered by them.

The Kursk plant, located in a region which borders Ukraine, said after the attack that there were no casualties and that radiation levels and operations were normal.

Ukrainian officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday. Kyiv generally declines to confirm or deny military operations on Russian territory.

Russia in July complained that a Ukrainian drone had struck an apartment building in Kurchatov, a town built on the banks of a cooling pond for the Kursk nuclear power station.

Russia's FSB security service said in August last year that security around nuclear facilities had been beefed up after Ukrainian saboteurs had destroyed electricity lines supplying the Kursk plant, temporarily disrupting its functioning.

Kursk is one of several Russian regions that have regularly come under drone attack in the course of the 20-month war. The governor of Kursk reported a previous drone attack on Kurchatov on Sept. 1.

Thursday night's incident came a day after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said a Russian drone attack in Ukraine's western Khmelnitskyi region had probably targeted the area's nuclear power station.

The IAEA said that attack had destroyed "numerous windows" at the site but had not affected the Ukrainian plant's operations or its connection to the electricity grid.

Reuters was unable to independently confirm either incident.

** Belarus' Lukashenko says Ukraine-Russia war at stalemate, urges talks

Russia and Ukraine are locked in a stalemate on the frontlines of their war and the two sides need to sit down and negotiate an end to the conflict, Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian leader of Belarus and an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, said over the weekend.

"There are enough problems on both sides and in general the situation is now seriously stalemate: no one can do anything and substantively strengthen or advance their position," Lukashenko said.

"They're there head-to-head, to the death, entrenched. People are dying."

Russian forces have kept pushing this week near the ruined Donetsk city of Avdiivka suffering heavy losses, the U.S. White House said, but the vast frontline in Ukraine has moved little in the past year despite Kyiv's gruelling months-long offensive.

Lukashenko, who has provided his country's territory as a launch pad for Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, said that Ukraine's demands for Russia to quit its territory needs to be resolved at the negotiating table "so nobody dies".

"We need to sit down at the negotiating table and come to an agreement," Lukashenko said in a question and answer video posted on the website of the Belarusian state news agency BelTA.

"As I once said: no preconditions are needed. The main thing is that the 'stop' command is given."

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy reiterated on Saturday at a gathering of over 60 national security advisers that his 10-point peace plan, which includes calls for the restoration of Ukraine's territorial integrity, is the only way to end the war.

RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE

Russia displays Western shells used by Ukraine to attack civilians

A senior Russian diplomat at the UN has shown fragments of Western-supplied shells and missiles that he claimed Ukraine used to attack civilians in Donbass and other Russian regions.

Speaking at a regular Security Council briefing concerning Ukraine on Friday, Russia’s deputy ambassador to the UN, Dmitry Polyansky, described the ordnance pieces as “physical evidence of how Western-supplied weapons are being actively used by Ukrainians to attack civilian infrastructure.”

He showcased what he said was debris from a US-made HIMARS missile that hit a regional administration building in Russia’s Kherson region last September, killing three people and injuring several others.

Polyansky went on to present a much larger fragment which he claimed was part of a Storm Shadow long-range missile with “a discernible inscription ‘Made in France’.” He said it had been used by Kiev in June to strike a bridge linking the northern part of the Crimean peninsula with the mainland. This link, he added, was crucial for transporting food and other vital supplies. Storm Shadow missiles were supplied to Ukraine by the UK.

He also showed what was allegedly a piece of a HIMARS missile that killed one civilian and wounded 11 others in a Ukrainian shelling of Donetsk in July. Another fragment of the US-made munition the diplomat displayed was said to have come from the shelling of Makeyevka, a town near Donetsk.

“Look at these fragments and imagine them being scattered around at a huge speed,” he said, addressing his British colleagues in particular. “Look here. You want people to keep silent about this,” he added.

Polyansky also stated that while Ukraine has been targeting civilians in Donbass since 2014, when large-scale hostilities erupted in the region following a Western-backed coup in Kiev, “the ‘civilized Western world’ has [long] been hiding behind a handy paradigm” that civilians there “had shelled themselves.”

According to the data provided by the Joint Center for Control and Coordination (JCCC) in the Donetsk People’s Republic, more than 4,700 civilians, including 139 children, have been killed in the region since February 2022. According to the now-defunct JCCC in the Lugansk People’s Republic, Ukrainian attacks claimed the lives of 192 people between February 2022 and February 2023.

** Russian air defense systems destroy 36 Ukrainian drones over Black Sea, Crimea

Kiev tried to attack targets on Russian territory with 36 drones, they were destroyed by air defense systems over the Black Sea and the northwestern part of Crimea, Russia’s Defense Ministry told reporters.

"On the night of October 29, [air defense systems] prevented an attempt by the Kiev regime to carry out a terrorist attack by aircraft-type UAVs on facilities on the territory of the Russian Federation. On-duty air defense systems destroyed 36 Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles over the Black Sea and the northwestern part of the Crimean peninsula," the ministry said.

Reuters/RT/Tass