Skip to main content

Pouring Gasoline on a Raging Fire: Face-off Intensifies at Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine

Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine.

 

Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine.    Photo: AP

The war that began in February 2022, when Russia unjustly invaded its neighboring country of Ukraine, quickly turned into a war between rival, nuclear-armed powers: on one side, the U.S./NATO, on the other, Russia. It is not a struggle between “autocracy" and “democracy.” The Ukrainian people and Ukrainian army are cannon fodder in this war—used cold-bloodedly to advance U.S. imperialist interests.1 Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people have been killed in this war, hundreds of thousands more made homeless, many more maimed, crippled, and raped, in a war that is unjust and criminal on both sides. As Revolution exposed and analyzed last week, right now massive escalations in this war are being prepared and could erupt at any time. The possibility of either side or both sides using nuclear weapons increases every day this war goes on.

And still another danger of this whole horrific situation “going nuclear” looms.

* * *

Specter of Nuclear Disaster at Zaporizhzhia

The largest nuclear power plant in Europe is in the region of Zaporizhzhia, in southeastern Ukraine. The city of Zaporizhzhia (which has a population of over 700,000) and the region around it, including the nuclear plant, have been occupied by Russia since shortly after the war began. But as the largest land war in Europe since the end of World War 2 has raged in its vicinity, the plant is still staffed largely by Ukrainians, under Russian supervision.

South Ukraine showing Crimea and position of nuclear plant at Zaporizhzhia.

 

Map dated August 2022   

Fighting around Zaporizhzhia has left the matter of responsibility for the plant’s safety and security unsettled and uncertain. Both sides have blamed each other for artillery shelling that has damaged buildings at the plant at least six times, “and brought down power lines essential to cooling fuel in its six reactors …” Lack of cooling could set off a chain reaction that triggers a major disaster like those at power plants in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011, and Chernobyl, Ukraine in 1986. As National Public Radio reported in March, “the specter of a possible nuclear meltdown hangs over every minute of the war.”

This spring a United Nations report said the situation at Zaporizhzhia is "extremely fragile and dangerous" and that as “military activities” continue, the danger of damage to the plant, and possibly a nuclear meltdown, grows. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) developed five “principles” to reduce the risk of a catastrophic nuclear event at Zaporizhzhia, beginning with both sides pledging not to attack the plant or launch weapons from it. But as of late May, “neither Russia nor Ukraine committed to respect” these principles to “try to safeguard Ukraine's Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.”

So, on top of the possibility of the war itself escalating to the use of massively destructive nuclear weapons that both the U.S. and Russia control, there is the possibility of a nuclear meltdown at Zaporizhzhia that neither side is acting to prevent, in the middle of a heavily populated region. From any rational perspective, from any assessment that takes into account the interests of humanity, this is truly, murderously insane.

It is also a concentrated expression of the expand-or-die logic of capitalism-imperialism. The entire dynamic of this war must be radically changed in the interests of humanity, not rival and contending imperialists.

Bob Avakian expressed this fundamental truth in an interview on The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show

We can no longer afford to allow these imperialists to dominate the world and to determine the destiny of humanity. They need to be overthrown as quickly as possible.

_______________

FOOTNOTES:

1. See Revolution’s “The War in Ukraine and the U.S. Threats Against China: A Resource Page” for more on the history and nature of this war, including numerous important articles by Bob Avakian. [back]

Help Make 2024 Our Year—a Year of Revolution! 
Donate to Revcom.us

From the genocide in Gaza, to the growing threat of world war between nuclear powers, to escalating environmental devastation… the capitalist-imperialist system ruling over us is a horror for billions around the world and is tearing up the fabric of life on earth. Now the all-out battle within the U.S. ruling class, between fascist Republicans and war criminal Democrats, is coming to a head—likely during, or before, the coming elections—ripping society apart unlike anything since the Civil War. 

Bob Avakian (BA), revolutionary leader and author of the new communism, has developed a strategy to prepare for and make revolution. He’s scientifically analyzed that this is a rare time when an actual revolution has become more possible, and has laid out the sweeping vision, solid foundation and concrete blueprint for “what comes next,” in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America

The website revcom.us follows and applies that leadership and is essential to all this. We post new materials from BA and curate his whole body of work. We apply the science he’s developed to analyze and expose every key event in society, every week. Revcom.us posts BA’s timely leadership for the revcoms (revolutionary communists), including his social media posts which break this down for people every week and sometimes more. We act as a guiding and connecting hub for the growing revcom movement nationwide: not just showing what’s being done, but going into what’s right and what’s wrong and rapidly learning—and recruiting new people into what has to be a rapidly growing force.

Put it this way: there will be no revolution unless this website not only “keeps going” but goes up to a whole different level!

So what should you give to make 2024 our year—a year of revolution? 
Everything you possibly can! 
DONATE NOW to revcom.us and get with BA and the revcoms!    

Your donations contribute to:

  • Promotion of BA on social media and the Bob Avakian Interviews on The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show 
  • Strengthen revcom.us as an accessible, secure, robust website able to rise to the challenge of meeting the extraordinary demands of navigating the storms and preparing for revolution in this pivotal, unprecedented year
  • Fund revcoms to travel to national “hotspots,” where extreme contradictions are pulling apart the fabric of this country and creating the possibility of wrenching an actual revolution out of this intensifying situation
  • Expand the reach and coverage of revcom.us
  • Printing and distribution of key Revcom materials including the Declaration and Proclamation