Russian Strikes On Nuclear Plants May Presage Tactics In War With NATO

Forbes

6 days ago

A fire rips through Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant after it was captured by invading ... More Russian troops, who have also surrounded the site with explosive mines. This image of the ultra-hazardous fire is a screen grab from a video released by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (Photo by Ukrainian Presidency / Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Russia's ongoing attacks on nuclear power plants in Ukraine might foreshadow similar battle tactics in a future war with NATO, says a British expert who has written about the Kremlin's defense strategies.
Invading Russian troops seized two Ukrainian nuclear power outposts in the early days of the war—the first time ever that an extreme-risk atomic station has been captured by armed force—and they continue dangerous military maneuvers, including drone strikes, around both.
The invaders, who still forcibly control the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, might booby trap the site to transform it into the world's most colossal 'dirty bomb,' says Simon Bennett, a scholar at the University of Leicester, in England.
Dr. Bennett, author of the book Atomic Blackmail? The Weaponization of Nuclear Facilities During the Russia-Ukraine War, tells me in an interview that if Russian leader Vladimir Putin one day faced defeat in his bid to conquer Ukraine, he could surround each of the Zaporizhzhia plant's six reactors with mines, and remotely detonate the devices, creating clouds of nuclear fallout that speed across Europe.
Nuclear experts at the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration, which have jointly set up a Ukraine Task Force, say: 'Russian personnel have occupied and controlled Ukraine's Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) since Russian forces seized the site on March 4, 2022.'
While remotely monitoring the site, these American experts state in a report that: 'Russia's placement of military equipment and explosive mines around ZNPP has jeopardized the safety and security of the plant, the lives of Ukrainian staff who operate the plant, and the security of the surrounding area.'
'Multiple mines have exploded around ZNPP,' they warn, 'some set off by animals, contributing to a dangerous atmosphere at the site.'
Guards of honor stand sentinel in front of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant to commemorate the ... More staff who died during explosion and meltdown of one of the site's nuclear reactors back in 1986. Nuclear watchdogs are now warning of the risk of a new disaster as Russia pelts two of Ukraine's atomic stations in drone attacks. (Photo by Sergei SUPINSKY / AFP) (Photo by SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP via Getty Images)
Russia's armed occupation of the nuclear outpost, Bennett says, enables the Kremlin to engage in 'atomic blackmail'—against not only Ukraine, but all of Europe—with just the threat of weaponizing the uranium-rich complex.
He points out that a massive explosion and meltdown of one reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear outpost a generation ago generated radioactive clouds that swiftly crisscrossed national borders.
'As demonstrated by the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown and radionuclide release,' he tells me, 'plumes of radioactive debris can travel many hundreds of miles.'
'Chernobyl's plume reached Cumbria in England, where it contaminated farmland.'
That means Putin and his defense chiefs would be courting extreme peril—including to Russia—if they were to sabotage the Ukrainian power plant and trigger the meltdown of even one of its reactors.
'Should any of Ukraine's nuclear power plants be hit—even the plants in the far west of the country—there is a real possibility that, if there were a persistent westerly wind, the plume would reach Russia's heartlands,' Bennett says.
Ironically, he adds, Russia's current advances in its missile blitzes against Ukraine, and its glacial battlefield gains, could prevent Putin from transforming Zaporizhzhya into a super-size radiological bomb.
Moscow has been blitzing Ukraine with its missiles, even as the Kremlin stages drone attacks on ... More Ukrainian nuclear power complexes. (Photo by NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA / AFP) (Photo by NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP via Getty Images)
Yet if the tides of war change, Bennett predicts, and Moscow's military forces ultimately face being routed from Ukraine, the Kremlin commander-in-chief might opt to cover the democratic enclave in radioactive plumes created by the destruction of its atomic power stations.
'If cornered and facing unrest at home (raising the prospect of him being forced from office), he [Putin] may decide to do what Hitler did in 1945 when he [the Nazi leader] issued his infamous Nero Decree – destroy everything, including his own people, in a final act of machismo and spite,' Bennett says.
The Kremlin is playing with nuclear fire by continuing to pelt the Zaporizhzhya and Chernobyl nuclear complexes in drone assaults, even as Putin sporadically shoots off threats to deploy his arsenal of nuclear warheads against any NATO nation that directly intervenes to help Ukraine repel the Russian invaders.
On Valentine's Day this year, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that a drone attack 'caused a fire on the building confining the remains of the reactor destroyed in the 1986 Chernobyl accident.'
IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said the strike 'underlines the persistent risks to nuclear safety during the military conflict.'
The attack on Chernobyl, which pierced the high-tech shield positioned over the reactor that had exploded in the world's worst nuclear disaster ever, so far has not triggered a new release of radiation, Grossi said.
The twin-shelled shield cost more than $1.6 billion—contributed by a coalition of nations aiming to protect Ukraine and the European Union from a renewed spread of radiation, The New York Times reported. The shield appeared to be deliberately targeted, perhaps as a run-up to more intense Russian strikes on the site in the future.
Grossi said the aerial assault 'once again demonstrated that nuclear safety remains under constant threat for as long as the conflict continues.'
Russian President Vladimir Putin has threatened to deploy his nuclear warheads against any Western ... More power directly intervening to halt his invasion of Ukraine, even as he steps up "atomic blackmail" against Europe by occupying a Ukrainian nuclear power complex and surrounding it with mines. (Photo by Gavriil GRIGOROV / SPUTNIK / AFP) (Photo by GAVRIIL GRIGOROV/SPUTNIK/AFP via Getty Images)
'There were no reports of casualties,' he said, yet added: 'The IAEA remains on high alert.'
Just weeks ago, Grossi said the IAEA team stationed at Ukraine's Zaporizhzhya plant, where the nuclear safety guardians remain despite the escalating wartime dangers, reported hearing hundreds of rounds of small arms gunfire that ripped through the night.
The crossfire followed 'a clear escalation in drone strikes during this war, also affecting Ukraine's nuclear power plants and potentially putting them in further danger,' added Grossi, a longtime diplomat and disarmament scholar with a doctorate in international relations from the University of Geneva.
Dr. Bennett, meanwhile, predicts the Kremlin's quest to extend Russia's borders will not stop at Ukraine, and that Putin's dream of recreating the Soviet Union could escalate to spark a new global war.
'The Russian president has been determined to recover Russia's lost glory,' Bennett says. 'He has made it his life's work. It's a personal crusade.'
'Russia has been preparing the ground for a confrontation with the West since Putin became Russia's president.'
Bennett's prophecy of an ever-expanding war that begins racing across Europe like a wildfire in some ways echos and amplifies a warning issued by NATO General Secretary Mark Rutte in the run-up to the NATO summit in June.
'There is great worry in many circles of NATO,' Rutte said.
'We have heard the Chief of Defense in Germany, a couple of weeks ago, and many other senior military leaders speaking about this, and also senior intelligence community people speaking about, that between 3, 5, 7 years from now, Russia will be able to successfully attack us.'
NATO chief Mark Rutte has warned that Russia could attack a NATO state within the next three to ... More seven years (Photo by)
As the Kremlin counts down toward its confrontation with the Western Allies, Bennett muses, it is likely already creating its masterplan for victory.
Moscow's attacks on Ukraine's atomic stations, he says, could be mere precursors, testing varying battle stratagems to lay the groundwork for the destruction of nuclear stations positioned in NATO nations in the future.
Could Moscow already be mapping out pre-emptive missile strikes on British and French nuclear reactors that in turn contaminate the continent and its citizenry with mortal doses of radiation?
Bennett says it's 'more likely that Russia would seek to sabotage critical national infrastructure, including nuclear power plants, from within using sleepers,' or Kremlin intelligence agents who have adopted new identities, complete with foreign passports and elaborate cover stories, across Western nations.
'Russia has had over a decade (the origins of the current war can be traced back to Russia's 2014 invasion of Crimea) to insert sleepers into critical national infrastructure installations such as nuclear power plants, gas-powered stations, airports, ports, communications hubs.'
'I think it likely that Russia has in place sleepers across any state it considers hostile,' Bennett adds, 'which, of course, would include NATO member states.'
'Which means that Russia has a head start on us.'
'It is easier to infiltrate liberal democracies than it is to infiltrate authoritarian states like Russia.'
'The former are open,' he says. 'The latter closed.'
'The UK's National Security Act is a belated response to this threat which, as I said, has been building.'
This act, Bennett adds, aims to counter 'threats to national security from espionage, sabotage and persons acting for foreign powers,' including the sleepers deployed by Putin, a onetime KGB espionage operative.
Putin was stationed in East Berlin when he watched—in agony—as pro-democracy demonstrators pulled down the machine gun-guarded Berlin Wall and freed the millions of East Germans who had been captured behind the shoot-to-kill barricade.
Tanks approaching a checkpoint area of the Berlin Wall. Vladimir Putin, a KGB agent stationed in ... More East Berlin until the fall of the Berlin Wall, now dreams of recreating the Soviet Union and its satellite states (Photo by)
As this democracy movement ricocheted across Eastern Europe, and communist rulers were toppled like dominoes, these satellites of the Soviets crossed into new orbits around NATO, after the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics itself crumbled.
Putin's fever-pitch passion since then has been to turn back time and revive the Soviet empire, even if that means Russian tanks and troops reinvade Eastern Europe and other post-Soviet realms.
Peering into the storm-cloud future, Bennett predicts the next world war will erupt within the next decade, even as Putin's sleepers are activated to sabotage atomic stations and 'agencies such as the police service, the fire and rescue service … [and] defense contractors.'
Elena Grossfeld, an expert on Russia's intelligence and defense operations at prestigious King's College London, points out that Putin, a world master of espionage and sabotage, like his Soviet forebears Lenin and Stalin, has already had more than two decades in power, ample time to despatch sleeper agents across the West.
And the top-echelon sleepers turned out in Putin's 'illegals program,' she tells me in an interview, form just one class of spies.
Other agents include Russians recruited during the mass exodus of intellectuals and technocrats since Putin's rise to power and foreigners lavishly bribed to join the Kremlin's intelligence corps.
'With multiple sabotage operations in Europe, Russian intelligence has been using a variety of agents.'
Yet the size of Putin's shadow army of spies across Europe and the U.S. is difficult to estimate, she says.
If even a handful succeed in infiltrating European or American nuclear power outposts, the potential could arise for this fifth column to sabotage the plants with the outbreak of a war.
'Damaging adversary infrastructure is aligned with Russian military and intelligence approaches,' Grossfeld says.
And, whether in Ukraine now or in some future target of Moscow's aggression, she adds, 'The potential destruction of a nuclear power plant could be used to benefit Russia's military plans - as in, creating a denied territory, or some other purpose.'