A Russian energy giant is building two new nuclear power plants in Hungary. Russian President Putin issued a decree increasing the number of Russian armed forces. New details emerge in the Dugina murder case. All voices and developments on the Ukraine war here in the ticker.
5.40pm: Concerns about a possible radiation leak at Europe’s largest nuclear power plant continue, satellite images captured by Planet Labs PBC and available to Britain’s The Guardian show a plume of smoke rising from fires at the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant on Wednesday. According to the report, the authorities distributed iodine tablets to local residents.
Particular attention is paid to the cooling systems, the systems need electricity to function. The plant was temporarily taken off the grid on Thursday because fire damage to a transmission line was feared. A failure of the cooling system could cause a meltdown.
3:26 p.m .: The war in Ukraine is still raging – and there is no end in sight in sight. In an interview with “Welt”, Wolfgang Richter, ex-General of the German Armed Forces, explains why that is – also – because: “On the Russian side, the goals have changed completely. The original goal of preventing NATO accession has now been superseded by neo-imperial goals,” says Richter, citing the “repatriation of Russian soil” as one such goal.
The problem, according to Richter: “We actually don’t know exactly what Russia is aiming for. Maybe that’s opportunistic: ‘We’ll get what’s feasible,'” Richter suspects. “That’s why we don’t have a negotiating position at the moment. Nevertheless, I believe it is in all of our interests to bring about such a situation and then to put out feelers as to where acceptable compromise lines could be.”
12:57 p.m .: At the end of a four-week UN conference on nuclear weapons, Russia blocked the adoption of a joint final declaration. Despite a final session that was postponed by several hours, “the conference is unable to reach an agreement,” said Argentinian Gustavo Zlauvinen, chairman of the NPT Review Conference, on Friday (local time) at the UN headquarters in New York.
The representative of Russia, Igor Vishnevetsky, had criticized a lack of “balance” in the more than 30-page draft of the final declaration. Moscow has objections “to certain paragraphs that are patently political,” he said. Russia is not the only country that has fundamental objections to the text.
According to information from negotiating circles, Russia primarily raised objections to passages to the Ukrainian nuclear power plant Zaporizhia, which is occupied by Russian troops and has been shelled repeatedly in recent weeks. The shelling has raised fears of a nuclear disaster similar to that in Ukraine’s Chernobyl in 1986.
According to the draft, seen by the AFP news agency, the conference wanted to express its “serious concern” about military activities at Ukraine’s nuclear power plants and other security-sensitive facilities, particularly the Zaporizhia nuclear plant. It was also criticized that the responsible Ukrainian authorities “as a result of these military activities” no longer had control over these facilities, which had “profound negative effects” on their security.
The head of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (Ican), Beatrice Fihn, questioned the usefulness of the conference. “The real problem is that with or without a draft, it currently does nothing to reduce the nuclear threat,” she said. The draft is “very weak and unrealistic”. There were no concrete disarmament commitments.
In a statement, Austria primarily criticized the nuclear powers France, Great Britain, Russia, China and the USA. The five countries, most notably Russia, resisted nuclear disarmament, while most of the signatory states advocated credible progress.
Contrary to what was stipulated in the treaty, the nuclear powers had increased or perfected their arsenals, Austria criticized. “During the negotiations there was no discernible will to implement the contractual obligations that have not yet been fulfilled.”
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which came into force in 1970 and was created by the five nuclear powers of the USA, the Soviet Union, China, France and Great Britain, now has 191 states. The agreement obliges the signatory states without nuclear weapons to renounce them.
The treaty review conference began on August 1 in New York. UN Secretary-General António Guterres said at the start that the world is currently facing a nuclear threat “the likes of which have not existed since the height of the Cold War”. He pointed to the war in Ukraine, tensions in the Korean Peninsula and the Middle East – and the 13,000 nuclear weapons in stockpiles around the world. Mankind is “just a miscalculation” away from nuclear annihilation, Guterres warned.
The negotiations also discussed other issues that are extremely sensitive for some states, such as Iran’s nuclear program and North Korea’s nuclear tests. At the previous review conference in 2015, the signatory states had also failed to reach agreement on substantive issues.
12.41 p.m .: Britain is sending six so-called underwater mine detector drones to Ukraine to clear the coast of water mines.
As the British Ministry of Defense announced on Saturday, Ukrainian soldiers are to be trained in the use of autonomous drones by the Royal Navy and their US partners in the coming months.
Saturday, August 27, 8:46 a.m.: According to the Hungarian government, the Russian energy company Rosatom will start building two new nuclear reactors in the country in the coming weeks. “This is a big step, an important milestone,” said Hungary’s Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto on Friday on the online network Facebook. The project is largely financed by a loan from Russia.
On Thursday, the responsible Hungarian regulatory authority gave its approval to the new building, which would cost the equivalent of 12.5 billion euros. A start of operation of the new reactors in 2023 is “realistic”, said Szijarto. “We can now move from the planning phase to construction.”
The construction activity will be visible in the coming weeks at the site of the new reactors – the nuclear power plant in Paks, 100 kilometers south of Budapest, which has been in operation since the 1980s. The Akw Paks currently supplies about 40 percent of Hungary’s electricity needs.
The contract to build the two new reactors between Hungary and Rosatom was signed in 2014.
10:04 p.m .: The second power plant unit from Zaporizhia was reconnected to the Ukrainian power grid. The operator of the nuclear power plant reported this on Telegram. Capacity is currently being ramped up. Before that, the first of the units that had been switched off yesterday had gone back on line at noon. According to the operator, the nuclear power plant was completely disconnected from the Ukrainian power grid on Thursday due to fires in ash pits.
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