JAKARTA - The head of Ukraine's state-owned nuclear energy company said on Sunday there were signs Russian troops might be preparing to leave the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant they captured in March soon after the invasion.
Such a move would be a sea change on the battlefield in the partially occupied southeastern region of Zaporizhzhia, where the front line has barely shifted for months. Repeated shelling around the plant has raised fears of a nuclear holocaust.
"In the last few weeks we have effectively received information that signs have emerged they may be preparing to leave (the plant)," Petro Kotin, head of Energoatom, said on national television.
"Firstly, there have been a large number of reports in the Russian media that it would be very beneficial to vacate (the plant) and it might be appropriate to hand over control of it to the (International Atomic Energy Agency)," he said, referring to the UN nuclear watchdog IAEA.
"One gets the impression they packed their bags and stole everything they could," he continued.
Russia and Ukraine, which was the site of the world's worst nuclear accident at Chornobyl in 1986, have for months repeatedly accused each other of shelling the Zaporizhzhia reactor complex, which is no longer producing energy.
Asked whether it was too early to talk about Russian troops leaving the plant, Kotin said on television: "It is too early. We are not seeing this now, but they are preparing (to leave)."
"All (Ukrainian) personnel are prohibited from passing through checkpoints and traveling to (controlled) Ukrainian territory," he said.
Previously, the Head of the IAEA met with the Russian delegation in Istanbul, Turkey on November 23 to discuss establishing a protection zone around the plant, the largest in Europe, to prevent a nuclear disaster.
It is known, the Zaporizhzhia NPP usually provides about one-fifth of Ukraine's electricity needs.
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Meanwhile, Russia's news agency, RIA quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov a day after the meeting as saying a decision on the protection zone should be taken "quite quickly".
Ukraine this month recaptured the southern city of Kherson and a tract of land on the right bank of the Dnipro, in the Kherson region which lies east of Zaporizhzhia province.
On Friday, the UN nuclear watchdog said three Ukrainian nuclear plants in government-controlled territory had been put back on the grid, two days after a Russian missile strike forced them to shut down for the first time in 40 years.
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