← Ukraine: The Latest
Ukraine: The Latest
'Hiroshima without radiation': refinery inferno spews black rain & Ukraine kills 12 Russian FSB officers in drone strike
00:47:06
Loading summary
Transcript77 lines
- [00:04]
Jade
The Telegraph.
- [00:09]
Dom Nichols
I'm Dom Nichols and this is Ukraine the latest. Today as black rain continues to fall over the Russian city of Tapsi after the recent strikes on the oil refinery, some Russians are likening their plight to that of Hiroshima. We report on the latest innovation in drone technology with interceptors launched from fixed wing planes in flight. And we hear how fresh from a spat with Donald Trump, Prince Harry did something much more worthwhile and visited a demining charity in Ukraine. And later we have our regular update on resistance activity in occupied Ukraine. And Adelaide has a special report marking 40 years since the Chornobyl disaster. Bravery takes you through the most unimaginable hardships to finally reward you with victory.
- [00:56]
Francis Dernley
Russia does not want this.
- [01:06]
Dom Nichols
If I'm president I will have that war settled in one day. 24 hours. We are with you.
- [01:11]
Simon Evans
Not just today or tomorrow, but for 100 years.
- [01:19]
Dom Nichols
Nobody's going to break us.
- [01:21]
Simon Evans
We are strong.
- [01:22]
Dom Nichols
We are. Ukraine is. It's Friday the 24th of April, four years and 59 days since the full scale invasion began. And today I'm joined by my co hosts Francis Dernley and Natalie Pojman Ponte. I'll start with the military updates. Now we've been talking about Kupyansk a lot recently. So this is in the northeast of Ukraine. Ukrainian forces ejected Russians from the center of the city a few weeks ago. But Russia has continue the pressure on the outskirts basically from the north through the east to the southeast. The city is basically split in two by the Oskil river that runs north and south. Ukraine is mainly on the west side of the city, but does have a lodgment on land to the east of the city. Well, yesterday Ukrainian Joint Forces task force spokesperson Colonel Viktor Treobov said Russian forces have intensified infiltration missions north of Kupiansk and are trying to eliminate that Ukrainian salient but by intensifying assault operations on the left bank of the Oskil River. Remember when we talk about rivers left and right, it's the direction of flow of the water. Left, right, instead of saying east, west, north, south, all that kind of stuff. Now incidentally, he That's Treohov and 3rd Army Corps refuted claims by General Gerasimov of Russian positions in the sector. He was talking the other day, Gerasimov, this is claiming that they were holding all sorts of positions, which is demonstrably not the case. Across Ukraine yesterday six people were killed and 40 injured. Russia launched two Iskander M ballistic missiles and 107 drones at Ukraine overnight. The air force said this is mainly in the north and the east and the south. Ukrainian air defenses intercepted 96. There were a series of attacks on several residential buildings in Odessa, killed a married couple there, both aged 75, and injured 15 other people. Now this morning, Ukraine's General Staff dismissed the Commanders of the 10th Corps and and 14th separate mechanised brigade over allegations of losing Ukrainian positions, providing inadequate support to frontline troops and concealing the true situation in their sectors. The daughter of a former soldier from the 2nd Mechanized Battalion, part of the 14th Brigade, posted photos of severely emaciated soldiers who she said are stationed in the Kharkiv oblast without food or water. Ukraine's Defence Ministry had responded yesterday by saying the commander of the 14th Brigade had had taken note of the situation and the efforts were underway to address supply issues and rotate personnel. However, it was announced early this morning that 14th Brigade Commander Anatoly Lisetsky has been replaced now. Black Rain is a 1989American neo noir action thriller film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Michael Douglas and Andy Garcia. The film focuses on two New York police detectives who arrest a member of the Yakuza and must escort him back to Japan. Once there, he escapes and the two officers are dragged into the Japanese underworld. Black Rain is also the name for the stuff that's still falling over the Russian city of Toapsi and which continues to be reported by residents. Oil has continued to be mixed with rain following the two strikes on the nearby refinery in the last week. The Kyiv Indy reports one resident who clearly hadn't heard of the ecological disaster that followed Russia's destruction of the Nova Kakhovka Dam in 2023, killing dozens of people and drowning huge areas of Herzon Oblast as saying, this is honestly some kind of environmental disaster. What am I supposed to do? I do not want to stay here anymore. I need to leave today. Why is this happening? It will not wash off at all. This is just a nightmare. Another woman posted a video of herself driving along a road where smoke could be seen rising from the oil refinery, saying TO Vladimir Putin, Mr. President, we went to the polls, we voted for you, we believed in you. And for a while we really were protected. Everything was fine. But at some point you it all collapsed. I do not know what will happen next. I do not know whether to believe you to believe the government, who to believe, what to think when you see all this horror when residents of my beloved city are suffering. Then, in a slight exaggeration, the pro Russian telegram channel Ria Katyusha said the consequences of the Bombardment of Tapsi are simply monstrous. What is happening there now is Hiroshima, only without radiation. Even Pavel Kumrikov, who's known by the call sign Shakespeare and is a member of the Russian proxy forces in the Donbas region, said on his telegram channel, the soil is poisoned, the water is poisoned, the air is poisoned. Right now, black rain is falling there like in Hiroshima. Water mixed with oil, soot. Now, we're told concentrations of benzene and soot in the air are two to three times higher than normal in several districts of the city. And that was, as of Tuesday, reported by the Krasnodar Krai Emergency response Headquarters. Local residents have been advised to limit their time outdoors and to wear masks. Images online show the Tuapse river still very heavily polluted. Now, I don't welcome the damage to the environment and I don't wish for civilians to be harmed. And for the record, in no way do I find this story amusing. Okay, I need to talk about drones now. Earlier this week, we spoke about the record breaking interceptor drone launch. It was only a trial, but it was reported that occurred earlier this month. Ukrainian drone manufacturer Wild Hornets carried out a flight which was controlled over 2,000 kilometers. Well, the latest Ukrainian innovation is to launch interceptor drones from the wing of an AN28. That's a turboprop aircraft, a propeller aircraft. There's footage online that shows the drones being launched from under the wings. The benefit there, by launching from an aircraft or in the skies. It's got the altitude, it's also got the speed. Anyway, this comes as Ukraine's Minister of Defense, Mykhailo Fedorov yesterday announced an expansion of the POINTS system that military units use to purchase weapons on the government platform Brave One Market. This is a little bit controversial and a little bit technical, so stick with me. Since the beginning of this year, military units have ordered air and ground drones and other electronic warfare stuff worth about 14 billion Horivna. That's just over US$300,000 through the brave One Market scheme using E Points. Now, E Points are awarded to military units that can confirm the destruction of Russian equipment and personnel using video recordings from drones. Now, virtually every drone has a camera, as I saw recently in Zaporizhzhia. And as we saw there, it is binary. If you are hit by a drone, as long as it functions correctly, you are not wounded, you are dead. So it's very easy to prove that you've killed someone or wiped out some equipment and earned these E points. Points are also awarded for sniper operations, helicopter, combat ops, and mobile fire groups targeting shahed type drones. Now Mr. Fedorov said that ePoints allow units to independently select and order battle tested equipment they need urgently adding, we plan to expand the program to include new areas in the near future. Now, just while we're on drones, I noted an interview published yesterday with the Kyiv Independent's Katerina Denisova with Ukraine's former Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. He said Trump will not change his stance on Ukraine. He rejected Zelenskyy's offer to help in the gulf for one reason. He doesn't want to owe anything to Ukraine. He would even see it as a humiliation to admit that he cannot fix Iran without Ukraine's support. And where is President Zelenskyy today? He's in Saudi Arabia meeting Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Now in a tweet he said, today we are advancing our agreements with Saudi Arabia in the areas of security and energy and infrastructure. It is important that the strengthening is mutual. I appreciate the substantive cooperation between our countries. It's very interesting what's happening on the diplomatic front at the moment. Now, where else? On the Diplo front, Putin has responded to the increasing number of complaints about the mobile Internet restrictions currently being imposed on Russian society. In a very rare acknowledgment of public anger, he said during a government meeting yesterday that he understood the upset, but such actions were necessary because of the terrorist attacks, that is Ukrainian long range drone strikes. He said Russia must prioritise the protection of its people and claimed there would be security risks in informing Russians about the outages ahead of time. Now he's obviously trying to close down the disgruntlement and blame Ukraine, but I just wonder if letting the genie out of the bottle in this way will give the issue more oxygen. If genies need oxygen, I suppose. Now what next? It's the second day of the EU leaders meeting in Cyprus today. Latvian Prime Minister Avika Selina was upbeat on her way in, referring to the 90 billion euros loan for Ukraine that the bloc has just got over the line. She said the EU may have longer discussions, but we can deliver what we promised and that's important. It's an important message to the world, to the European Union and to our people. All fine, but now I just would ask them to go and have a look at those Russian Shadow Fleet tankers going through the Baltic Sea and the English Channel. Another three yesterday chaperoned by the Russian frigate Admiral Grigorovich, as well as those frozen Russian assets. So EU very good, but could do better anyway at the meeting, Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk said of the European Council meeting, for the first time in years, there are no Russians in the room. Huge relief. He was obviously talking about the absence of Viktor Orban. It got a typically irony free and humorless response from Putin's special envoy Kirill Dmitriev, who said, see you in two months as you come to Russia to beg for energy. Please save enough jet fuel for the flight. Absolute barnstormer now. Donald Trump has said Prince Harry does not speak for the UK after the Duke of Sussex urged the US to step up to defend Ukraine. Donald Trump said, Prince Harry is not speaking for the UK that's for sure. I think I'm speaking for the UK More than Prince Harry now. In his remarks, Harry did not address Trump by name, but called on American leadership to to do more. He said the United States has a singular role in this story, not only because of its power, but because when Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons, America was part of the assurance that Ukraine's sovereignty and borders would be respected. The Duke also used his Kyiv speech to address Putin directly, saying, no nation benefits from the continued loss of life we are witnessing. There is still a moment now to stop this war. He accused Moscow of committing a war crime and and an act of genocide by forcibly removing tens of thousands of Ukrainian children from their homes and transporting them to Russia. He said under international law, the forcible transfer of children from one national group to another is not just a war crime, it can constitute an act of genocide when carried out with intent to destroy a people's identity. He said. This is not collateral damage. This is not the chaos of war spilling over. This is organized, systemic, intentional and designed to endure long after the fighting stops. Then, in a swipe at the Sussexes, and not at all sounding like a Mafia godfather, Trump finished with Prince Harry. How's his wife? Please give him my regards. Anyway, separately yesterday, Mr. Trump said that he would not oppose inviting Putin to the G20 summit, which is set to take place in December at the US President's Doral Golf Club in Miami. He told reporters if he came, he would probably be very helpful. A US State Department spokesperson later told the Kyiv President Trump has been clear that Russia is welcome to attend all G20 meetings as the United States focuses on delivering a successful and productive summit. Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister, Alexander Pankin, said Moscow will confirm who will represent it at the event. Closer to the date. Then, after his little spat with Donald Trump, Prince Harry joined the Halo Trust, the humanitarian landmine clearance organization made famous in 1997, which when Princess Diana visited a minefield it was clearing in Angola. Harry was with them near Bucha for a demonstration of the latest digital demining technology. He flew an AI powered drone which detects and maps the position of lethal explosives, and then operated a robot used to remove explosives from the ground. He said it's amazing to see technology transform the work of HALO Trust, making mine clearance smarter, faster and safer. When my mother visited Angola nearly 30 years ago, deminers carried out their work on their hands and knees to uncover hidden explosives. Now they're also using drones, AI and robots for greater precision and protection. This isn't just progress, it's life saving. Good use of the also there because a lot of demining is still done on hands and knees. He then paid his respect at Bucha's memorial to the civilian victims of the Russian occupation that took place between 27 February and 31 March 2022, and which left the land and buildings around Bucha littered with deadly mines and unexploded munitions. Thankfully, after years of work by HALO experts and others, much of the land around Bucha is now safe. Earlier this morning, Frances caught up with Dr. Jay McLynn of King's College London for the latest of our fortnightly segments dedicated to the occupied territories. In case you missed it, yesterday we released an exclusive interview I did with a leader of the Ukrainian resistance. There are links in the episode description, but let's hear from them now.
- [14:06]
Natalie Pojman Ponte
Jade, over to you. Where are you exactly?
- [14:08]
Jade
Yeah, I'm in Izium, which is in Kharkiv region. It's about two and a half hours drive towards Dogbass. So this is Siversky Donetsk River. It's just out shot. I can show it to you in a minute. And the city and some of the ruined buildings behind me.
- [14:25]
Natalie Pojman Ponte
Ah yes, we can see them. Remind us, Jade, what took place there.
- [14:30]
Jade
So Zoom was under occupation from early March 2022 until it was liberated on September 9, 2022, if I'm not mistaken. And I'm actually standing specifically on a bridge, which is a bridge where people tried to flee the city or even just get from one part of the city to a perceived safer part of the city. Because you have to remember the mobile network was at best patchy and then completely disappeared. Some, some parts of the city went very hungry because there wasn't particularly those who lived in flats, who didn't have additional kind of vegetable gardens. And in this particular bridge, people tried to cross from one side of the City over to Seversky, Donetsk river to the other, and the Russians shot them. So there were a lot of corpses.
- [15:15]
Natalie Pojman Ponte
Izium was one of the sites, if I recall, where many bodies were excavated. Do we know numbers, Jade, of those that were. Were exhumed then?
- [15:24]
Jade
To be honest, I don't know the numbers off the top of my head and listeners will have to excuse me a little bit because I've been speaking all day to people who lived under occupation, so I'm not on top of my game because obviously they're pretty horrible conversations from memory, the people found in those particular mass graves. It was in the hundreds, but I think we're talking about much larger numbers as we've heard of in Mariupol. Many people just buried loved ones somewhere, you know, under blankets, kind of in makeshift graves. And then, you know, there are also bodies that will just probably never be found.
- [15:58]
Natalie Pojman Ponte
What kind of things, Jade, before we turn to the updates and other subjects, are they saying to you there that you've spoken to this morning?
- [16:05]
Jade
There were so many horrible stories, but there's one story of a man who was a kind of friendly neighbor, I suppose, and he was a really lovely guy, you know, pretty successful. He had a nice car, but maybe his wrist calculus was a bit off. And he really loved the Ukrainian national anthem, which, to be honest, I also really love. I think it's such a beautiful, you know, I love the words. But of course, he's Ukrainian and then came to be living under occupation, so he really, really loved it in a way that, you know, an English woman is not going to understand. And he listened to it at home in the privacy of his own apartment, and a neighbour told on him. And then the next series of events aren't particularly clear, except for that the FSB came to his home, or perhaps the military police, there's different versions. And then he was discovered hanged for listening to the anthem in his own personal space. That story stays with me just, I think, because of. We talk about the resistance on here, but. And I do try to talk about just how risky it is, but just stories like that, they really bring it home to you, like the incredible bravery of what people are doing, but also just the. Really just the consequences. And also, I mean, a lot of the stories were just about how the Russians stole absolutely everything, like sweets that they'd got for kids, you know, just stole everything. There was a picture of a washing machine on a stretcher for injured soldiers that they showed me. And then they sarcastically said, oh, poor guys, they didn't manage to carry it off in time. So somehow, remarkably, despite living through some really terrible things, you know, this group of people, some of whom were, you know, taken by the FSB and then, because it was close to liberation, are still alive. I guess they still managed to keep their sense of humor, and admittedly very dark humor, but seems to be a very Ukrainian trait to. People can make jokes like that.
- [18:04]
Natalie Pojman Ponte
Yeah, you talk about the risk there, Jade. And we've just published an interview with one of the leaders of the Ukrainian resistance in Mariupol, and he said something very telling, where when Dom asked him about the risks for anybody caught doing any resistance activity, he said, death at a minimum. And I mean, what a way of putting it. Right. Because there are implications for other people as well as your own life involved in this. And I just wonder if you could perhaps comment on. On the Mariupol resistance. You've obviously talked about that a lot.
- [18:31]
Jade
Yes, I mean, of course I can't go to Mariupol. You know, there's. There's no way for me to kind of ever understand. And with the greatest apologies to those people, I hope there's never any way for me to understand what they've been through and what they're going through and what it must take. The fact that we have so much information about Mariupol, the fact that we're able to see so many of the things that are done, the fact that we have images of the mass graves, you know, the pits and the pits and the pits of bodies lying on top of bodies stretching on for ages. That's all because of the work of the people in Mariupol who are part of that network, and to Petro's incredible leadership of that network on the other side and keeping those people there safe.
- [19:17]
Natalie Pojman Ponte
Well, Jade, I'm aware that your time is very precious, particularly when you're out in the field as you are today. So perhaps we can go into the updates.
- [19:24]
Jade
Yes, so let's go on to the updates of the resistance going from 9th April 2026 to 22nd April 2026. So there were 15 confirmed operations. And carrying on from what I said about last week, just to clarify, there were six of them that happened in the occupied territories and nine of them that happened in Russia, in the Russian Federation. So we're seeing this continuation of. Of them conducting activities of movements from the occupied territories or Ukrainian underground figures carrying out activities inside the Russian Federation, which I imagine for the Russians to be a rather unintended consequence of passportization, forcing everybody to Take a Russian passport has its downsides for everybody. It would appear. So the main pattern was the deliberate pressure on the systems that allow Russia to hold and use occupy territory, power supply, railway support, communications, local mobility. And the most active regions in this period were the Luhansk region, the Zaporizhzhia region, where also we've seen the Ukrainian and Special forces, the SOF or sso, you know, providing some incredible footage in recent days and weeks of all of their attacks that are clearly designed into occupied Zaporizhzhia and surrounding areas that are clearly designed to stop any Russian advance in around Kuliaipole in that area. So if we focus first on Zaporizhzhia, Melitov stands out as one of the clearest pressure points. So there were two separate incidents, one on 9 April and one on 14 April, both of which involve substations. Why a substation? Because obviously it matters beyond the immediate technical damage, it interrupts electricity supply, creates pressure on local occupation systems and complicates military and occupation routines. The repeated attacks that we're seeing on substations suggest an effort to stress both the occupation administration itself and military support by targeting a shared system. In Luhansk. On 18th of April, a sabotage action hit an electrical substation in the city of Luhansk with the reported destruction of a transformer that powers the railway supply hub. It's quite difficult to replace a transformer. It's not something you can quickly fix. In Luhansk, the destruction of the transformer is not something that could be easily replaced. So the strike has effects beyond the immediate site. It delays repair cycles, disrupting rail movement. And obviously Russia very dependent on the rail for supply chains. And then on the 20th of April, another case in the Luhansk region involved the burning of a vehicle. Vehicle, so like a traditional one, burning of a vehicle that belonged to a Russian occupier. So slightly different tactical form. In occupied Crimea, on the 11th of April, there was again, this is a bit of a kind of golden oldie from our updates, if you will. There was a railway relay cabinet that was. Sorry, my hands are so cold. There was a railway relay cabinet. So the railway signalling infrastructure was hit near Sevastopol. And on 16th of April there was a communications tower was burned in the Krasnokhardi district. So in Crimea the focus has been much more on the technical architecture that supports movement control and communication. And again in Crimea and in Krasnodar region inside Russian Federation, we've been seeing again a lot of attacks by the sof. So those attacks as well. It's interesting to note, particularly given your interview with Petro, that you know, these are attacks that have an impact on the communication infrastructure and Maroop resistance, you know, recently have conducted a number of quite communications or data driven attacks that they've reported publicly. We often talk about other topics like the repressiveness of the regime and clearly a huge part of that is controlling the information infrastructure, controlling the communication system. Russia has essentially total control over the occupied territories in terms of its surveillance mechanisms and information. Not total, but near total. And you know, being able to destroy that, being able to kind of destroy those points is also important, you know, for other reasons beyond just direct military relevance.
- [23:32]
Natalie Pojman Ponte
Well, thank you very much Jade, for talking us through this and for Ilya as ever, for his assistance in compiling those updates. Always Ilya, thank you. And just before you go, Jada, I know it's, it's very cold where you are, so I'm sorry, I feel, I feel guilty asking any more questions, but one more if I may. Before we came on air, you were just mentioning religious persecution and I just wonder if it's not a theme that we've talked about very much when we've focused on the occupied territories. Perhaps you could just say a word about that before you go.
- [23:57]
Jade
Yes, of course. So it's funny. Well, not like nothing I say is funny, haha, I think on these things. But it's, it's, it just so happens that we've been gathering a lot of, because there's quite a lot of data but it's in different places and then you need to check it against other sources and things like this and one's own kind of field work and interviews. But we managed to bring it all together and to get some, some kind of hard, hard statistics. So obviously the suppression of different religious communities, communities who are not the Moscow Patriarchate version of the Orthodox Church has been happening in occupied territory since 2014. But there's a dramatic acceleration after February 2022. Even in those areas under occupation since 2014. For the evangelical Christians, including Pentecostals, there were 366 communities in De Vets region. So just over there before 2014, 95% of those have now been destroyed. Of those 366 communities, they no longer exist. Baptist communities, again there were approximately 186. Now only again, 95% of them are wiped out. Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Kyiv Patriarch it won't come as a surprise, 100% destroyed. So not even, you know, allowed A nominal sort of representation. There were 86 such communities in occupied Donbas. Jehovah's Witnesses, who of course, deemed extremist and illegal under Russian law, again, reduced by 100%. There were 83 communities. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was basically a Catholic church, but there's a long kind of historical reason why it's the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church that I'm too cold to explain in any way. It does justice.
- [25:42]
Natalie Pojman Ponte
Another episode, Jade, another episode.
- [25:44]
Jade
And in my defense, I can hear artillery. So please, again, again, listeners, I beg for your forgiveness. But, yeah, there were 49 communities and 100% of them. So there's not a single active Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church that remains in occupied even by 2018. So this actually even happened before2022. And of the Seventh Day Adventists, who are quite. I mean, I don't think I've met that many Seventh Day Adventists in Britain, for example, but I've met quite a few here. And obviously that's only anecdotal, but there were 36 communities and, yeah, 90% reduction. So there's just some statistics to kind of show how much, essentially we're talking about the total wipeout of alternative religious communities in the Christian. We focused on Christian denominations.
- [26:28]
Natalie Pojman Ponte
Really important as well, because as you say and allude to there, Jay, this is used often as a weapon, particularly in the United States, by those who are more pro Russian and inclination, shall we say, they say, well, Russia is protecting Christianity and Orthodoxy and actually they're eradicating it.
- [26:44]
Jade
And the irony is, of course, that many of these denominations are the same denominations of those people in the U.S. i mean, it would be one thing if those people in the US belonged to the Moscow Patriarchy. Often they themselves are Pentecostals or evangelicals. And you know what happens. And I have to say as well, of course, like everything, it's much harsher in the occupied territories, the repression. But I remember writing a report about the repression against Protestants in 2020 that was happening inside the Russian Federation. So, you know, they don't even have to go if. If their dislike for Ukraine is so strong and it could just look at what happens in Russia itself.
- [27:18]
Natalie Pojman Ponte
Well, Jade, thank you so much for your time today. Do stay safe out there and we'll let you go so that you can go and find somewhere to get warm.
- [27:25]
Jade
Gonna find some hot chocolate.
- [27:27]
Natalie Pojman Ponte
Yeah, absolutely. And hopefully an English cup of tea somewhere. All right, thank you, Jade. Speak to you soon.
- [27:34]
Dom Nichols
Thanks, Jade and Francis. Now, Sunday marks the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. A few weeks ago, Francis discussed the legacy of the catastrophe and what it meant for Ukrainians living in the area. Today, ADLI looks to the future with Simon Evans, Director of the Chernobyl program at the European bank for Reconstruction and Development. They discuss the consequences of the drone strike on the plant in January 2024 and what it will take to repair the structure. This is their conversation.
- [28:02]
Francis Dernley
Simon Evans, thank you for coming to the Telegraph today. You're the head of the Chernobyl programme at the European bank for Reconstruction and Development, so can you talk us through what has been the work of the European bank for Reconstruction and Development since the Chernobyl disaster?
- [28:16]
Simon Evans
A long story, but the EBRD was invited by the international community back in the late 90s to establish a fund, which was then called the Chernobyl Shelter Fund, that was looking at the long term options for stabilising the situation at the Chernobyl site following the 1986 accident.
- [28:37]
Francis Dernley
And so we've talked a lot on this podcast about the strikes that happened on the casing that surround the reactor. Correct. What does that strike mean for the infrastructure that surrounds the reactor?
- [28:51]
Simon Evans
The strike was on the new safe confinement and the new safe confinement was put in by the international community and finished in 2019. The new safe confinement was the sort of jewel in the crown of the Chernobyl site, providing a long term solution to safety, security and most importantly, the capacity to start decommissioning and dismantling the old reactor and its lethal inventory. It was a huge program, probably the biggest ever international collaboration on nuclear safety with 45 different countries participating, it led by us, and it allowed Ukraine to look to the future with the confidence that it had the capacity to deal with the long term safety implications of the accident. For the first time since 1986, the drone strike on the facility was in many respects the first ever military attack on a civilian nuclear infrastructure facility since the start of civil nuclear power. And it's had fairly devastating consequences. The arch is not just a confinement that is somehow a cover over the reactor. It's really a complicated and complex piece of decommissioning equipment designed at its most simple to do two things. One is to confine against further releases of radiologically contaminated debris from the old reactor and to provide the facilities for deconstruction of the old reactor. Now, both of those core functionalities have been chronically compromised or disabled as a result of the drone strike. Firstly, the confinement capacity, because the drone strike hit the north side of the arch and it went through both the outer and the inner shells.
- [30:37]
Francis Dernley
So the arch that you're talking about Is what we've seen in the videos and in the photo of the strike, which is this sort of like big metal arch, which I know is also nicknamed the sarcophagus. Is that right?
- [30:46]
Simon Evans
It's the new safe confinement. The sarcophagus is the fantastic piece of engineering. Built over the destroyed reactor by the Soviets in 1986.
- [30:56]
Francis Dernley
So you have two layers. You've got the 1986 sarcophagus and the new case confinement. And so it's made of two layers.
- [31:03]
Simon Evans
Yes, it has an inner layer and an outer layer. And the reason for that is that across the whole facility, you have what's known as over pressurization in that areas called the annular space. And you have under pressurization in the main volume of the facility. And the reason for that is that minimises the flow of contaminated air from the inside to the outside. Now you've got a huge great hole in it. That confinement has been destroyed. More significantly, what happened at the time of the strike Is the drone hit the facilities, and there's a complicated layering of cladding on the confinement, and it caused a fire on the membrane within the cladding that took about two weeks to extinguish across the whole north side of the confinement, Basically destroying that side of the cladding for the confinement. Which also crucially meant that the humidity controls for the facility Were also not working. This gets a little bit technical here, but the arch is steel. Normally when you have a steel structure, you protect it from corrosion with passive corrosion control, Essentially anti corrosion painting. And when that's reached its lifetime, you go in and repaint it. You can't do that at Chernobyl, because there are areas where the radiation levels Are simply too high and too complex. So the arch had what was known as an active corrosion control system to keep humidity levels a certain low level so corrosion could not get hold. To give you an example, there are areas on top of the arch where people could work for maybe 11 hours a year before they reach their stipulated radiation doses. So you can see the complexity involved in this. So the humidity controls were there to minimize the human requirements, to preserve it for 100 years. That's now gone as well, which is hugely significant because we don't have that capacity. So the integrity of the arch is now being brought into question.
- [32:58]
Francis Dernley
It must also have been incredibly difficult to control the fire and to repair the arch with these radiation levels. The firemen and the workers working on the aftermath of the strike must have been a great risk themselves.
- [33:12]
Simon Evans
It's not been repaired yet. This is the problem. To put out the fire, you had the drone strike, which caused about a 15 square metre hole in the outer and inner layering. Then you had the fire, which burned, smouldered slowly across the north side of the arch, across the membrane. And the fire brigade, in order to get to that membrane, they had to go up onto the arch and cut additional holes in the cladding. So you have 300 or so additional holes in the cladding which need to be repaired. So the whole of the cladding has been fundamentally compromised. The fire was put out after about two weeks, but it's caused intense damage.
- [33:46]
Francis Dernley
And so what solutions are we looking at now? Because obviously Ukraine is under constant attack. There could be more strikes on the confinement casing. So what would it take to be able to repair the arch?
- [33:59]
Simon Evans
It's unclear at the moment. It's incredibly complex. There were a series of engineering assessments made, including the possibility that would we have to slide the arch away from the reactor to enable work to continue. That has now been discounted. We think we can repair it in situ, but it's going to take some very complex engineering with, for example, localised shielding, innovative solutions, to be able to patch in certain places. What we can't do is to simply repair it using the original design specifications. It's going to have to require something different, potentially. It's going to have to look at options to reduce the design life of the facility or have a rolling repair program or something along these lines. So compromises, I fear, are going to have to be made.
- [34:44]
Francis Dernley
What is the urgency that we're looking at in how many months or years does this needs to be done to prevent further damage and to prevent a further disaster?
- [34:53]
Simon Evans
The essential question here is corrosion control of the main steel structure, because once corrosion starts, it's very difficult to stop it. We have engineering estimates that suggest we have around four years before corrosion starts without the active corrosion control in place. And this is because we have various holes in the cladding and water ingress and weather impact from it. So we think we have four years. That's not certain. It's going to be subject to some enhanced corrosion control monitoring, but getting the corrosion under control to stop the further degradation of the structure is really the number one priority.
- [35:26]
Francis Dernley
You must have been really shocked when you heard the news of the strike.
- [35:29]
Simon Evans
I was horrified. We were used to horrendous news from Ukraine and rather immune to it in a certain tragic sense. But I was horrified that actually came to the consequences of a strike against a civil nuclear facility. It was unbelievably reckless.
- [35:43]
Francis Dernley
And I imagine as well that in your job, you must be thinking about a lot of different scenarios of what could go wrong with the casing and with the arch. And I imagine natural disasters. Was war one of them?
- [35:55]
Simon Evans
No. The arch was designed to be incredibly robust to design all sorts of weather conditions. Tornadoes, extreme temperatures, very carefully designed to resist fire. But the fire was two sources. A lightning strike from the outside or a fire from withinside. The structure it was never designed to defend, essentially from a missile strike. And that's the scenario we have now.
- [36:19]
Francis Dernley
And the Russian forces also occupied Chernobyl for a little bit under two months. That must also have been very worrying. What did that cause in terms of either damage or in terms of. We see that in Zaporizhzhia, where they've taken over a nuclear power plant, and you have experts working on the plant that can either no longer access it or have had to go, have had to flee. I imagine that has come with a lot of consequences as well.
- [36:42]
Simon Evans
Absolutely. The consequences have been extreme. Even without the drone strike for Chernobyl. Chernobyl remains, in my view, probably the world's most vulnerable nuclear facility. And the war and the occupation ratcheted up that vulnerability hugely. The Russian occupation of the site in the early part of the war didn't cause any damage to the nuclear infrastructure, but a lot of the facilities were damaged. So laboratories, offices, equipment, bridges, roads, access, all those sort of things were very severely impacted, which has a huge residual impact on the ability of people to manage the plant safely. And that's one of the key issues, I think, that is often underestimated, that sort of human factor in terms of how you continue to operate a nuclear plant safely.
- [37:28]
Jade
Yeah.
- [37:29]
Francis Dernley
And the accessibility, as you say, the roads, anything that leads to Chernobyl, you know, you can travel around Ukraine. But I can imagine how the war just makes everything more complex.
- [37:39]
Simon Evans
The International Atomic Energy Agency introduced a very interesting metric called the seven indispensable Pillars of Nuclear Safety in Times of War. Okay, and I like that.
- [37:48]
Francis Dernley
What are they?
- [37:49]
Simon Evans
I like these. I can't name all of them, but I like them very much because they were not technical. They were very straightforward in things like free access to the site for workers, free access to supply chains for essential spare parts, regulatory control of the facilities by the safety regulators. And at various stages of the war, all of those seven indispensable pillars have been violated at Chernobyl on Sunday will
- [38:16]
Francis Dernley
be the 40th anniversary of the disaster. To what extent do you think the international community is sufficiently aware of the risk of what's happened in Chernobyl? Also, are they taking into account what could happen with this current war and future wars on other power plants? And are they there to support Ukraine and to support the work that needs to be done?
- [38:38]
Simon Evans
I think the international community absolutely is there to support Ukraine, support the work that's done. They were there with us for 20 years in the run up to the conclusion of the new safe confinement. And it was an incredibly impressive long term patient international collaboration, which was a demonstration of solidarity and recognition that nuclear safety is not a national issue, it's an international issue. I think the view from the international community up until the war was really though, that the era of big international support for decommissioning at Chernobyl was coming to a conclusion and it really was now down to provide Ukraine with some shorter term expertise to help them manage the facility with the infrastructure the international community had provided. Those assumptions have been shattered by the war, both in terms of the infrastructure, but also in terms of Ukraine's own capacity to deal with this.
- [39:35]
Jade
Yeah.
- [39:36]
Francis Dernley
What amount of money are we looking at in order to fix the arch?
- [39:42]
Simon Evans
It's very difficult to say. Engineering estimates have a figure of something like 500 million plus. And a lot of that is driven by complexity and a lot of that is driven by the radiation levels in certain areas where we have to do the repair. What we are doing at the moment is in a step by step approach to look at early engineering options and early procurement options. We'll define that figure in a better way. But there are no good scenarios here.
- [40:11]
Francis Dernley
Yeah. There are only scenarios where it gets worse.
- [40:13]
Simon Evans
Yes.
- [40:14]
Francis Dernley
Just to go back to a point that you mentioned, in some areas of the casing, humans can only work for 11 hours a year. What is the radiation risk for the people working near the plant and who would be working on repairing the casing? It will be incredibly dangerous for them as well, won't it?
- [40:31]
Simon Evans
I think we, we shouldn't get too excited about this in that what we are looking at is registered and how we mitigate the consequences of radiation risks at the site. And they are well understood now and they are well mitigated, but they are a limiting factor on the ease with which we can do this. So I would emphasize that the radiation levels around the arch, they're well understood and well known. They don't have a safety impact in terms of requiring people to put themselves in extra danger. But they do have a big driver on the complexity of the cost and the complexity of the labor force that has to there. And so it really drives cost. And that's the key issue. We understand the risks and we manage them very well. And they are our number one priority at the site. But it does drive complexity in the engineering solutions we're able to bring to this, of course.
- [41:25]
Francis Dernley
And the last point I wanted to talk about is Ukraine had set aside a budget and was responsible for the decommissioning of inside the sarcophagus and inside the casing of the reactor. Are they still able to do that? Do they still have the capacity to do that with the war or is that also postponed at a later date?
- [41:43]
Simon Evans
I don't think there's been a formal postponement of this as such, but I think the assumptions that we had before the war, that really now this was by and large over to Ukraine to handle the long term decommissioning challenges. Those assumptions are no longer valid. It's clear that Ukraine is facing a desperate economic situation as a result of the war. And the idea that it will be able to stand alone now to deal with the consequences of Chernobyl is not valid.
- [42:12]
Francis Dernley
What could be the potential consequences in delaying the decommissioning?
- [42:17]
Simon Evans
There are various twofold. In terms of the repairs to the arch, we have the clock ticking in terms of the degradation of the facility, where we have to be able to put a stop to that. The aim of the arch or the aim of the new safe confinement was to enable the decommissioning of the old structure underneath the old sarcophagus and the old reactor. And that had certain engineering estimates for how stable that structure was. And it's clear now that is not going to be able to decommission that within the timelines that we originally envisaged. So that does represent a higher risk. But ultimately the imperative that we are able to move forward with deconstruction still remains. It's just that we now have a far more complicated situation on our hands.
- [43:02]
Francis Dernley
Simon Evans, thank you very much. Just to wrap up on maybe a lighter note, we usually have final thoughts at the end of the episode and obviously this is a pre recorded interview, but I wondered if you had any recommendations for our listeners and viewers who may want to learn more about Chernobyl. Chernobyl has made its way into popular culture as well. So I was just wondering if you had any recommendations.
- [43:24]
Simon Evans
There are numerous recommendations and personally I loved and I didn't expect to love it. The Chernobyl HBO series. One of the reasons that I thought it was a fantastic program is that the narrative around Chernobyl, which you're also familiar with, tends to be one of disaster, secrecy, technical incompetence, all this sort of stuff. And yet I felt that the HBO series really, for me, bought out the individual heroism that was around at the time of the accident and the immediate aftermath of it, the selflessness of the liquidators. And I thought that was very creditable. And as we project further forward, 40 years further forward, we can see that being replicated again with, for example, the firefighters who put out the latest fire caused by the Russian drone. When I look at that, I look at Chernobyl through a prism of not just haunting disaster, but what can be achieved when we pull together in the right direction.
- [44:19]
Francis Dernley
And also with the bravery that the Ukrainians have shown back then and now.
- [44:22]
Simon Evans
Yes, exactly.
- [44:23]
Francis Dernley
Are you sometimes worried that something similar could happen at Zaporizhzhia, for example?
- [44:29]
Simon Evans
Zaporizhzhia is an entirely different reactor design and there's not been the Chernobyl type disaster there. So it's a completely different picture. But it's certainly true to say at Zaporizhzhia. Coming back to the International Atomic Energy Agency and their seven indispensable pillars of nuclear safety in times of war, they've all been violated as Aporizia. So it's imperative that they manage to get that site under control and under proper authorization to make it safe.
- [44:59]
Dom Nichols
Well, thanks, Adley. Just to finish off a couple of things, thanks to George and Barb from Toronto. Glad you enjoy the pod and the tank chat. If you like tank chat, then do go and check out Hamish DBG's recent article at the Telegraph about his trials with the Challenger 3 tanks. So do gonna have a look at that, George and Barbara. And also well done to Razom for Ukraine, the nonprofit based in Washington that supports Ukraine. They took 20,000 teddy bears to the National Mall in Washington, each representing a Ukrainian child abducted by Russia. Ostap Yarish, a chap we've had on the pod before, he said the message is clear. Bring Ukrainian kids back. The installation was created over five days with some bears forming the message. Putin abducted 20,000 Ukrainian children. Bring UK kids back. That's us for this week, folks. Have a good weekend if you're able to. And we'll be back on Monday, same time, same place. From the Telegraph newsroom in London, I wish you all a very good afternoon.
- [45:56]
David Knowles
Ukraine, the latest is an original podcast from the Telegraph created by David Knowles. Every episode featuring us in the studio maps and battlefield footage is now available to watch on our YouTube channel. Subscribe at www.YouTube.com Crainethelatest. There's a link in the description. If you appreciate our work, please consider following Ukraine the latest on your preferred podcast app and leave us a review as it helps others find the show. Please also share it with those who may not be aware we exist. You can also get in touch directly to ask questions or give comments by emailing ukrainepodelegraph.co.uk we continue to read every message. You can also contact us directly on X. You'll find our handles in the description. As ever, we're especially interested to hear where you're listening from around the world. And finally, to support our work and stay on top of all of our Ukraine news, analysis and dispatches from the ground, please subscribe to the Telegraph. You can get one month for free, then two months for just one pound at www.telegraph.co.uk Ukraine the latest my name is David Knowles.
- [47:10]
Simon Evans
Thank you all for listening. Goodbye.