The Russian army is turning Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, the Zaporizhzhya NPP, into a military base. This poses a threat to the huge facility and to all station employees.

This was reported by The Wall Street Journal with reference to information received from employees of the nuclear power plant. According to them, more than 500 Russian military personnel are currently stationed at the Zaporizhzhya NPP.

The occupiers deployed heavy artillery batteries and laid anti-personnel mines along the banks of the reservoir, whose water cools six reactors.

The positions of the Ukrainian army are literally a few kilometers away from the nuclear power plant on the opposite bank of the Dnieper, but the armed forces cannot attack the occupiers for fear of damaging the nuclear reactors.

According to the publication, in June, the Russian occupiers placed “Smerch” and “Grad” anti-aircraft missiles, as well as tanks and armored personnel carriers at the Zaporizhzhia NPP. The land around the station is covered with trenches. At the same time, technicians from the Russian state corporation Rosatom are at the NPP, they have set up their base in a guarded bunker and say they have arrived to provide advisory assistance.

“They keep it as a base for their artillery. They understand that Ukraine will not respond to their attacks with nuclear power plants,” a European official working in the city of Zaporizhzhia, which remains under Ukrainian control, told the source.

The station’s employees and their families fear that the growing militarization of the nuclear power plant could lead to a new nuclear disaster on the territory of Ukraine.

The newspaper notes that last week monitoring data stopped coming from the station to the IAEA for three days.

The day before, the Ukrainian state energy company “Energoatom” announced that Russian troops are threatening to drain the cooling basins. The occupiers suspect that Ukrainian resistance fighters have hidden weapons under the water. This can become a serious problem for nuclear power plants, which need a constant flow of purified water to cool the reactors.

The IAEA, which has been unsuccessfully trying to negotiate an inspection of the facility for several months, says that almost all of what it calls the “seven pillars of nuclear safety” are being ignored at the Zaporizhzhia NPP. These requirements include the physical integrity of the building, regular remote radiation monitoring, and a constant supply of spare parts, fuel, and consumables to the facility.

The main and immediate risk exists for station personnel. According to nuclear specialists, the capture of the station by the occupiers may lead to the fact that the employees of the NPP in a state of stress will make mistakes or simply leave the station in search of shelter in the territory controlled by Ukraine.

The Russian occupiers keep the employees of the NPP in fear, some of them are taken hostage to demand a ransom later. Currently, more than 40 people are in captivity out of 11,000 employees, the publication noted.