Kyiv—Staff at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant occupied by Russian soldiers were on Friday working to reconnect its reactors to the national power grid, the state energy operator said.
The plant—Europe’s largest facility—was cut off from Ukraine’s power network for the first time in its history on Thursday due to “actions of the invaders”, Energoatom said.
Early Friday, the operator said on Telegram that all reactors remain “disconnected from the electrical grid” as of 9:00 am local time (0600 GMT).
However, a severed power line—the cause of the outage—has been “restored” and “work is ongoing to prepare the connection” of two of the plant’s six reactors.
Zaporizhzhia has been cause for mounting concern since it was seized by Russian troops in the opening weeks of the war.
In recent weeks, Kyiv and Moscow have traded blame for rocket strikes in the vicinity of the facility.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said late Thursday the cut-off was caused by Russian shelling of the last active power line linking the plant to the network.
“Russia has put Ukrainians as well as all Europeans one step away from radiation disaster,” he said in his nightly address.
Kyiv suspects Moscow intends to divert power from the Zaporizhzhia plant to the Crimean peninsula, annexed by Russian troops in 2014.
On Thursday, Washington issued a direct warning against any such move.
“The electricity that it produces rightly belongs to Ukraine,” State Department spokesman Vedant Patel told reporters.
“Any attempt to disconnect the plant from the Ukrainian power grid and redirect to occupied areas is unacceptable.”
Meanwhile, France’s TotalEnergies said Friday that its Russian joint venture partner had confirmed it was not supplying Moscow with jet fuel to carry out strikes in Ukraine, following an investigative report by French daily Le Monde.
While most global energy giants have quit operating in Russia since its invasion of Ukraine, TotalEnergies has kept its lucrative natural gas operations in the country, though it has vowed to wind down purchases of Russian oil.
In particular, it owns 49 percent of Terneftegaz, a company that extracts gas from the Termokarstovoye field, according to its 2021 annual report.
The other 51 percent is held by Russian company Novatek, in which the French firm also owns a direct 19.4 percent stake.
Le Monde reported this week that Termokarstovoye is a source of natural gas condensates—a liquid hydrocarbon recovered when extracting the gas itself—that are sent by pipeline to a Novatek processing plant in Purovsky.
They are then sent by rail for further refining into jet fuel in the southern Siberian city of Omsk, which in recent months has been sent to Russian airbases near the Ukrainian border, Le Monde said, citing data from financial information firm Refinitiv.
Squadrons based there have been accused by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International of attacks on civilians, including the March 16 bombing of a Mariupol theatre where hundreds of people are believed to have died in what Amnesty described as a “war crime”.
TotalEnergies has contested the claims, but France’s Transport Minister Clement Beaune called Thursday for an inquiry “to shed all the light” on “an extremely serious matter.”
On Friday, it said Novatek had confirmed that all gas condensates produced by the Terneftegaz venture was sent to a processing site called Ust-Luga near Leningrad.
“The range of products derived during processing at the Ust-Luga Complex includes jet fuel (Jet A-1) that is exclusively exported outside Russia, and it does not even have the certification to be sold inside the country,” according to a Novatek statement provided by Total.
“Therefore, it is clear that the media publications and calls to investigate activities of TotalEnergies in our joint companies have absolutely no basis in fact,” Novatek said.
TotalEnergies also said it was considering legal action in a bid to end an “unfounded controversy which is damaging the reputation of the company.”
Chief executive Patrick Pouyanne had said in March that Russian gas fields exploited by the company’s joint ventures “are going to operate whether I leave or not” and are vital for supplying energy to Europe.
The EU has imposed a ban on most Russian oil imports and a coal embargo in response to Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, but it has avoided sanctions on gas as the bloc is highly reliant on Russian supplies.
But Moscow has sharply reduced gas exports to Europe in response to punishing Western sanctions, prompting a huge spike in prices as winter approaches.