Russian Forces fire rockets at Physics Institute with Nuclear Reactor Inside

Russian forces have fired rockets at a physics institute in Kharkiv containing Nuclear material and a reactor, Ukraine’s national security service has claimed. The strike on the facility comes on the eleventh day of the invasion, and the security service said it risks a “large-scale ecological disaster.”

It claimed that Moscow’s forces are firing missiles from truck-mounted “Grad” launchers, which do not have precise targeting, raising concerns that one would go astray. The Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology houses a Nuclear research facility called Neutron Source, in the active zone of which 37 Nuclear fuel cells are said to be loaded.

Footage published by Ukraine’s ministry of internal affairs on Facebook showed blasts hitting a building – supposedly at the Kharkiv institute – but there were no immediate reports of any damage to the Nuclear materials inside. Addressing US senators on Saturday, Mr. Zelensky said that while Vladimir Putin’s forces have taken their first major city in Kherson and have encircled Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Chernihiv and Sumy, Ukraine was “inflicting losses on the occupants they could not see in their worst nightmare.”

The Kremlin said on Sunday that Mr. Putin had told his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan that Russia’s military action in Ukraine could be halted “only if Kyiv ceases hostilities and fulfills the well-known demands of Russia.” In the wake of the fire at the Zaporizhzhia plant, experts said that the shelling had been unlikely to trigger a Chernobyl-style Nuclear disaster.