Ukrainian Crowd Blocks Russian Access To Nuclear Power Plant

A crowd of hundreds of Ukrainians on Wednesday blocked the road to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant as Russian troops reportedly took control of the area.

The plant, near the city of Enerhodar in the country’s southeast, is the largest in Ukraine and the whole of Europe.

Video shared on Twitter and verified by CNN shows plant workers and civilians congregating en masse on both the road into the facility and a set of railroad tracks nearby.

What appear to be garbage trucks are parked farther down the road, behind makeshift bunkers made of sandbags, parked cars and piles of tires.

Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s ministry of internal affairs, called on Russia to give the area a wide berth in a post on Facebook.

“An accident can happen like [the one] at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant or the Fukushima nuclear power plant,” reads Gerashchenko’s warning, as translated into English by The Telegraph.

“Russian generals – think again! Radiation does not know nationalities, [it] does not spare anyone!”

Gerashchenko’s fears are not unfounded. On Sunday, Russian missiles struck a radioactive waste disposal facility in Kyiv.

Ukraine’s State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate told the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that the building thankfully was undamaged and there were no reports of radioactive release.

The IAEA called on Russia to allow “necessary services, equipment and components” be delivered to Ukraine’s nuclear facilities at all times, and for the staff at such facilities to be given adequate rest so as to not “compromise their safety or put them under undue pressure.”

Russian forces that invaded the country seized control of the shuttered Chernobyl nuclear facility last Thursday, reportedly holding hostage the staff who maintain and protect the contaminated nuclear facility.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

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