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Ukraine and the Russian invasion, 2022-24

www.theguardian.com

More than 500 international students trapped in Ukrainian town – as it happened

Hundreds of students are stranded in Sumy in the north-east after days of shelling
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

A fire has broken out in Europe’s largest nuclear power plant located in Zaporizhzhya, according to an announcement from the mayor of the nearby town of Enerhodar.

“As a result of continuous enemy shelling of buildings and units of the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is on fire,” Enerhodar Mayor Dmytro Orlov said on his Telegram channel, citing what he called a threat to world security. He did not give details, Reuters reports.

Orlov recorded a short video message which has now been shared my multiple local Ukrainian media outlets, urging Russian troops to immediately stop shelling the plant.

Orlov earlier said Ukrainian forces were battling Russian troops on the city’s outskirts. and reported that a Russian military column was heading toward the nuclear plant. Loud shots and rocket fire were heard late Thursday.

According to a Telegram message posted by an employee at the plant, Russian troops fired at the nuclear facility.

“Attention! Equipment of the Russian Federation is firing at the Zaporozhye NPP. There is a real threat of nuclear danger at the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. We demand a ceasefire from heavy equipment at the Zaporozhye NPP!”

UNIAN agency also reports that a fire has started at the nuclear power plant.

The city on the Dnieper River accounts for one-quarter of the country’s power generation.
 
Perhaps looks like the seat of the identified fire is away from reactor halls and control. Reports that shelling has stopped (for now).

Reported dosimetry is reasonable background.
 
that feed is both terrifying, and but also absurdly futuristic. If I had seen 'people watching a firefight between Russia and Ukraine live at Europe's biggest nuclear power plant via the internet' as a scene in a near future sci fi film made 20 years ago, I'd probably have thought 'well, that's a bit far fetched'.
 
it's been switched off.

eta I was referring to the CCTV which had been switched to a loop
 
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Unverified: fire was in an educational facility but is now out. All but one of the reactors have been taken off-line as a precaution.

Earlier AP report on claims of elevated radiation levels but that was not apparent in the environmental monitoring around 10 minutes ago.
 
Mega Nuke plant premises fire is safely secured on this occasion. People go insane watching this senseless Russian attack on Ukraine. It is an apocalypse of biblical proportion.
David Miliband said Ukraine is a vavasour of Russia
 
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weltweit said:
Listening to the BBC Reith Lectures on AI this year the presenter said that the US military used an AI to plan its supply lines and logistics before its recent wars. Not saying that the task was beyond human planners but the implication was that the computers did a better job or quicker.

It certainly looks, at least in the north of Ukraine, like the Russians have miscalculated on their requirements for supplies to the front line. Or that static column is it, and it just isn't moving.
Click to expand...
Re the supply lines, apparently, the delay from the original invasion date meant that the invasion started in rasputitsa, mud season. It seems they have four seasons, but it's basically winter-mud season-summer-mud season, so both their spring and autumn mean non-tarmaced roads turn into a quagmire. Hence the Russian columns mostly sticking to the roads, because if they go off road, or venture into areas where the roads aren't laid, they get stuck. Partly an issue to do with the quality of tyres, or lack thereof.

This guy on Twitter explained it well in this thread.

 
(Tweet removed as it is embedded upthread @0112hrs)

Unverified local reports detail some damage to part of the cooling system but pressure now stabilised by on-site personnel. Last monitoring I could find indicated nothing significant above background (though no data has been available for an hour now); US DoE reports no elevated readings. Some power plant personnel reported wounded.
 
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2hats said:
Perhaps looks like the seat of the identified fire is away from reactor halls and control. Reports that shelling has stopped (for now).

Reported dosimetry is reasonable background.
Click to expand...

I've popped in to briefly waffle about this topic but still dont know when I'll be back on these threads more substantially.

Normally reading between the lines of breaking news about nuclear power facility incidents involves having to wait and see whether the initial reassuring stories are propaganda and figure out whether the situation is actually more serious than claimed.

During this war that stuff has been completely reversed. Partly because of the obvious and very real risks stemming from fighting around nuclear facilities, but also because the Ukraine government figured out right from the start that raising fears about a nuclear catastrophe might be a way to get the world to take the war more seriously and for European/NATO powers to intervene in a manner that there is otherwise very little prospect of.

And that has been taken to a new level tonight. These quotes are from the BBC live updates page, and demonstrate the pitch that this propaganda has reached:

As we've been reporting, Ukraine's president is urging "immediate action" from the world amid Russian attacks on Europe's largest nuclear plant.

"The biggest nuclear power plant in Europe is on fire right now," Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video posted on Twitter.

He accused Russians of deliberately shooting at the Zaporizhzhia plant's six reactors using tanks equipped with thermal imaging.

Invoking the "global catastrophe" at Chernobyl in 1986, he warned the consequences of a meltdown at Zaporizhzhia would be far worse.
Click to expand...

"Europeans, wake up please. Tell your politicians that Russian forces are shooting at the nuclear plant in Ukraine," he begged.

Zelensky said he had been in touch with leaders from the US, UK, EU, Germany and Poland, as well as the International Atomic Energy Agency, but called on ordinary citizens to raise alarms with their own politicians too.

"Russian propaganda has warned in the past that it would cover the world in nuclear ash. Now this isn’t just a warning, this is real."
Click to expand...

Since its the middle of the night its a bit early for me to judge what other countries will do with this latest stuff. But the first indications are that they will run with the rhetoric about this threat and will parrot it and maybe even use it to achieve something, but that something is still unlikely to resemble the sort of intervention Ukraine would like to see. But since the stakes are high I'll try not to make too many assumptions with my predictions about that.

In any case there is an obvious real risk, but the nuclear crying wolf pattern that has emerged in the last week where the initial reports making very scary claims about what exactly has been hit, claims that are then later rolled back, is rather annoying. Now there is a risk that I will be too relaxed next time I hear about an incident like this in the current war, and might indulge in skepticism that turns out to be misplaced. Especially since so far my skepticism on this front has been a reasonable guide, but I cannot rely on that always being the case.
 
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Kaka Tim said:
i posted this about the handheld stuff on another thread
Those NLAW and javelin anti-tank missiles are a crucial factor - hand held, accurate, relatively simple to use and can take out any tank with one hit. I was a but surprised by how many tanks the Ukrainian army claimed the took out in the first few days so did some research - and yeah, they are really effective and a real advantage to a defender. The NLAW costs £20,000. A Russian battle tank - fuck knows - a million or ten? The Ukrainian army are getting thousands of these missiles.

They are easy to use and you can have guys with these all spread over a large area. Maybe they get a mobile message that an armoured column is coming to this junction a few miles away (Ukraine will be getting all of NATOs surveillance info) - they hoof it over there - fire off a few of anti tank missiles and fuck off sharpish. Not sure how Russia can win against that sort of mobile defence in depth. They will be a bit like the napoleon's army in spain where they "only owned the land they were actually standing on". Also read somewhere that Ukrainian forces were letting the tanks go through - then taking out the supply columns following a few miles behind. Then the tanks run out of fuel and are sitting ducks.
But yeah - made me think that the tank is kind of obsolete (see also - impact of drones) .
Click to expand...
Shoot and scoot with the Javelins. Then when air support arrives bring up the Stingers. Rinse and repeat.
 
cupid_stunt said:
They are both short.

*under 175cm
Click to expand...
Can’t remember the exact wording of this joke but there was on about Macron visiting Ireland on an official visit. He was scheduled to go to a sporting event and he kept asking the taoiseach ‘will i have my own private box at the event?‘ Eventually they arrived at the event and he was led to his private booth. ‘Is this my private box?’. ’It’s over there’ replied the Irishman pointing at a wooden crate. ‘You can stand on it so you can see better you stumpy cunt’.
 
Breaking news on Sky, the Russian's have taken control of the nuclear plant, so at least the shelling should stop now.
 
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