Iran's Fordow nuclear enrichment plant: Satellite imagery reveals ongoing work at Iranian nuclear site bombed by US
The imagery was collected by Maxar Technologies on Sunday. Maxar said it 'reveals ongoing activity at and near the ventilation shafts and holes caused by last week's airstrikes on the Fordow fuel enrichment complex.'
The pictures show 'an excavator and several personnel are positioned immediately next to the northern shaft on the ridge above the underground complex. The crane appears to be operating at the entrance to the shaft/hole.'
According to Maxar, several additional vehicles are also seen below the ridge and are parked along the path that was built to access the site.
Earlier this month, American B-2 bombers dropped more than a dozen bunker-buster bombs on Iran's Fordow and Natanz nuclear sites, while Tomahawk missiles launched from a US submarine hit the Isfahan site in central Iran.
The US Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) bombs targeted the two ventilation shafts at Fordow, according to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine.
He told a Pentagon briefing last week that most of the bombs dropped at Fordow 'were tasked to enter the main shaft, move down into the complex at greater than 1,000 feet per second, and explode in the mission space.'
Former nuclear inspector David Albright, who now leads the Institute for Science and International Security, said that imagery from Fordow on Saturday showed 'the Iranians are actively working at the two MOP impact sites penetrating the ventilation shafts' at the plant.
Albright assessed that the activity 'may include backfilling the craters, as well as conducting engineering damage assessments and likely radiological sampling. The craters above the main shafts remain open.'
'We have observed that the Iranians have also rapidly repaired the bomb cratering damage on the main entrance road from only a few days prior. However, there are yet no indications of any efforts to reopen any of the tunnel entrances,' Albright posted on X.
On Sunday, the head of the UN's nuclear watchdog said US strikes on Iran fell short of causing total damage to its nuclear program and that Tehran could restart enriching uranium 'in a matter of months,' contradicting President Donald Trump's claims the US set Tehran's ambitions back by decades.
The comments by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi appear to support an early assessment from the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, first reported on by CNN, which suggests the United States' strikes on key Iranian nuclear sites last week did not destroy the core components of its nuclear program, and likely only set it back by months.
While the final military and intelligence assessment has yet to come, Trump has repeatedly claimed to have 'completely and totally obliterated' Tehran's nuclear program.
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Mr. Trump's invitation to Mr. Putin to join him in the armored presidential limousine for the ride to their meeting location without aides was a highly unusual gesture. Mr. Putin could be seen through the window laughing as the car pulled away. Democrats contended that hosting Mr. Putin under such circumstances sent a dangerous message. 'The photo-op in and of itself essentially legitimizes war crimes, telegraphs to other autocrats or evil men around the world that they can get away with murdering civilians and still get a photo-op with the president of the United States,' Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, said earlier on Friday on MSNBC's 'Morning Joe.' The hurriedly arranged meeting was meant to break the logjam that has stymied Mr. Trump's peacemaking efforts since he returned to office six months ago with a promise to end the Ukraine war within 24 hours. 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Mr. Zelensky, who was not invited to the conference called to determine his country's future, sought to influence it from afar by reminding the world that Russia continues to attack civilian targets in hopes of stiffening Mr. Trump's spine against Russian spin. 'On the day of negotiations, the Russians are killing as well,' Mr. Zelensky said in a video posted online before the meeting began. 'And that speaks volumes.' He added: 'Ukraine is ready to work as productively as possible to bring the war to an end, and we count on a strong position from America. Everything will depend on this — the Russians factor in American strength. Make no mistake — strength.' The meeting was the seventh in-person encounter between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin and the first of the American's second term. Mr. Trump said in the days leading up to the Alaska get-together that it was meant to be a listening session to determine whether peace was possible and that if he decided it was, he would then invite Mr. Zelensky to sit down with Mr. Putin directly. While it was originally scheduled to be a one-on-one meeting with Mr. Putin, along with interpreters, the session was expanded at the last minute to include Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff, the president's special envoy, who has been negotiating with the Russians. Mr. Putin was joined by Sergey V. Lavrov, his often feisty foreign minister, who sent a pointed message when he arrived in Alaska the previous night wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with CCCP, the Cyrillic letters for USSR. The two leaders, however, spent less time together than originally scheduled, raising questions about how far they got, and scrapped plans to hold a news conference in favor of the two making back-to-back statements on camera without answering questions. Neither did much to illuminate what happened, and American officials did not brief reporters, as is traditionally done after such meetings. In a rare move for the host of a diplomatic meeting, Mr. Trump deferred to his Russian visitor to speak first at their public appearance. Mr. Putin played to his host's sensibilities by offering validation of his longstanding insistence that Moscow would not have staged its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 if Mr. Trump had still been president. 'Today we hear President Trump say, 'If I were president, there would be no war,'' Mr. Putin said. 'I think that would actually happen. I confirm this.' He suggested that the two would now succeed at ending that war without saying how. 'I would like to hope that the understanding we have reached will allow us to get closer to that goal,' Mr. Putin said of security for Ukraine, 'and open the way to peace in Ukraine.' But he still insisted that any enduring peace had to address the 'root causes' of the war, a phrase that in the past he has used to insist on conditions unacceptable to the West, including a rollback of NATO and neutralization of Ukraine. And he asserted that Ukraine might throw a wrench in any peace effort by taking provocative action. When it came to his turn, Mr. Trump was equally vague on what if anything they had concurred. 'We had an extremely productive meeting and many points were agreed to, and there are just a very few that are left,' he said. 'We didn't get there, but we have a very good chance of getting there.' But the flattery registered. 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