Ukraine calls for sanctions on Russian nuclear industry

Kiev: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called on the West to impose sanctions against Russia’s nuclear industry in the wake of the fighting over the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant.

Russia is using the nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine to frighten people and to blackmail the Ukrainian leadership and the whole world, Zelensky said in a video address broadcast on Saturday evening.

Russia, a nuclear power in terms of weaponry, is “building nuclear power plants in several countries”, dpa news agency reported.

Kiev and Moscow have been accusing each other for days of being responsible for the shelling of the largest nuclear power plant in Europe.

Zelensky has accused Russian troops of using the Russian-occupied site as a fortress from which to fire on the small towns of Nikopol and Marhanez, which lie on the other bank of the Dnipro reservoir.

He warned that the deployment of Russian troops on the site of the nuclear power plant “increases the radioactive threat to Europe to a level that did not exist even at the most difficult moments of confrontation in the times of the Cold War”.

Zelensky called for “a tough reaction” in the video.

Earlier on Saturday, Ukraine called on Western states for help to prosecute Russian war crimes committed during the invasion of the country.

Kiev needed experts on military law and specialists in investigating war crimes to punish the Russian attackers, Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov said in a lengthy statement published on Facebook on Saturday.