How a sinister Russian gambit is playing out from a Ukrainian nuclear power plant

The video is haunting, and it’s not just the dark, dramatic music that plays over the images.

A spray of bullet holes in the turquoise metal walls of an office. A shattered window. A punctured roof.

The fins of a missile casing planted in the ground, amid a stand of birch trees, just a few hundred metres from the closest of the six reactors that make up the Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.

Controlled by invading Russian forces since March, the nuclear facility in Enerhodar — a name that means “the gift of energy” — is the largest in Europe and one of the biggest sources of global fear in this, the sixth month of the war in Ukraine.

From the Ukrainians come accusations that the occupying Russians have mined the plant, moved in weapons and military hardware and are carrying out sabotage attacks as part of a plot to cut Ukrainians off from their largest source of energy.

The concert of actions amount to “nuclear terrorism,” Ukrainian Human Rights Commissioner Dmytro Lubinets said Monday in calling for a United Nations security mission to be sent to Zaporizhzhia.

“The destructive consequences of nuclear terrorism and the spread of radioactivity do not ‘respect’ state borders and radioactive emissions spread uncontrollably, the consequences of radioactive pollution remains for decades,” he said in a statement.

The urgent call cited the words of a Russian general addressing his troops: “There will be either Russian land or a scorched desert … We are ready for the consequences of this step.”

The quote, which appeared online and quickly vanished, is disputed.

The gravity of the consequences in the event of a misfire, a wayward strike, a rambunctious Rambo from either side, are not.

The Russians started this — both the overall conflict back in February and a novel, sinister sort of nuclear gambit — when they first seized the Zaporizhzhia plant, with guns blazing, back in early March.

Since then, the Ukrainian staff of the nuclear facility have continued working under the watch of the Russian military and, reportedly, experts at Russia’s nuclear agency, Rosatom.

Moscow says its forces have been contending with Ukrainian drone strikes on and around the nuclear plant and, this weekend, a volley of rocket and artillery strikes at the facility.

The Ukrainians deny responsibility for the strikes, which are said to have caused a fire at a water pipeline, damage to nearby buildings and come dangerously close to an open-air yard containing 174 casks of spent nuclear fuel.

Moscow’s hand-picked administrator for the Zaporizhzhia region, Evgeny Balitsky, published the above-mentioned video of the damage Sunday.

On Monday, he was busy with another matter — announcing a future referendum that would make Zaporizhzhia, in Ukraine’s southeast, part of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. There is no date yet for the vote, but it points to the larger game that Russia has put into play in Ukraine.

Yes, Moscow has been cast in the role of the nuclear madman right from the beginning of this horrible show.

Putin’s performance began when he placed Russia’s nuclear deterrent forces on high alert due to nothing more than the assertion by British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss that Putin’s aggression could lead to a larger conflict with NATO countries if he wasn’t stopped in Ukraine.

But Russia displayed its utter recklessness or absolute ignorance when an invasion force churned up and dug into the poisoned earth of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, located in a toxic swath of land near the northern Ukrainian border with Belarus, either unaware or unconcerned about the real risks of radiation poisoning from the 1986 nuclear disaster before they were driven out by defensive Ukrainian troops in March.

It was around the same time that the Russians took control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant after an armed attack that resulted in a fire at a nearby training facility.

“By the grace of God, the world narrowly averted a nuclear catastrophe last night,” the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, told the United Nations Security Council the following day.

Nuclear experts later came to the rescue, weighing down the lofty rhetoric with facts and explaining that the risks of another Hiroshima, Chernobyl or Fukushima-like disaster were low.

But Moscow persists in using a gut-level fear of nuclear disaster to its military advantage.

Last week, the New York Times reported that Russian forces had parked Grad multiple rocket launchers between the Zaporizhzhia reactor buildings and armoured personnel carriers and military trucks in the turbine room of one of the reactors, information it attributed to a former mayor of Enerhodar.

If such claims are accurate, it would mean that Moscow is treating Zaporizhzhia’s six red-roofed reactors as something akin to human shields, allowing it to fire at will without the fear of provoking a serious counter-barrage.

“It’s a potentially catastrophic radiation shield which NATO and the West probably won’t do anything against,” said Lt.-Col. (Ret’d) Steve Nash, a former commander of the Canadian Joint Incident Response Unit, a military special operations unit that responds to nuclear, chemical and biological incident.

“The chance of a big event is not great, but the catastrophic nature of any event there could be. It could be a new Chernobyl, which affected the world for a couple of decades.”

It was Putin’s main NATO adversaries who have given him the courage to think that such a strategy might work.

U.S. President Joe Biden laid it out in March. He did not say the word “nuclear,” but he didn’t have to.

“Direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War Three,” he said, “something we must strive to prevent.”

When Russia invaded Ukraine, the West pulled its military training teams, delayed heavy weapon deliveries, refused Kyiv’s pleas for a nofly zone and rejected fighter jet donation schemes. All of this to avoid the Kremlin conclusion that Russia faced an existential threat, the doctrinal red line for Putin to deploy actual nuclear weapons.

In its extreme reticence to avoid an escalation and a hypothetical nuclear spillover, the West tacitly set the table for the odious strategy now playing out in Zaporizhzhia.

Now the nuclear plant is a Russian beachhead on the banks of the Dnipro River — the crown of the contested southern lands that have been seized by Russia, but which Ukraine intends to retake.

From the Zaporizhzhia plant’s control centre, Putin will be able to cut energy supplies to recalcitrant or rebellious parts of Ukraine that don’t bend to Russian rule.

In Europe, they are already fretting about the literal cold shoulder treatment from Russia, which is restricting oil and gas flows in advance of what will be brutal winter.

But Nash noted that Russians have a long history of taking the brutal cold and turning it to the country’s military advantage.

Stalin’s Red Army broke the back of Nazi Germany in the Second World War, he said.

“Read even Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace,’ where Napoleon’s armies captured Moscow. The Russians were fine in winter. They ate turnips and potatoes and they just waited to walk out and destroy the French army, Napoleon’s army — and they did.”

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It could be a new Chernobyl, which affected the world for a couple of decades.

STEVE NASH CANADIAN LT.-COL (RET’D)