The Ukrainian drones, with which Kyiv has been attacking Russian territory daily for the last month, reached the city of Kurchatov, in the Kursk Oblast, and one of the cities on the outskirts of Moscow on Friday. In Kurchatov is the Kursk nuclear power plant, a plant with reactors of the same type as those of Chernobyl.
The regional governor, Román Starovoit, denounced that the drone damaged the facade of a residential building. Previously, two drones were believed to have been involved in the attack. The flight of the device mistakenly led to the belief that there was more than one, said the politician. “There were no casualties,” Starovoit said, also not mentioning the nuclear power plant.
The city of Kurchatov, with about 40,000 inhabitants, was founded in 1968 to house the workers of the nuclear plant and is named after Igor Kurchatov, leader of the Soviet atomic project.
The Kursk nuclear power plant is one of the largest in Russia and has four reactors, the last of which was built in 1985. Only three are currently operational, according to data from the Russian state nuclear corporation.
Its RBMK-1000 reactors are of the same type as those at the Chernobyl plant, where in 1986 the biggest nuclear accident in history occurred.
During the current conflict, Russia and Ukraine have accused each other of attacking Ukraine’s Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe. Russian troops took control of those facilities days after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his army to enter the neighboring country in February 2022, in what he called a “special military operation.”
At the end of 2022, Ukrainian military intelligence claimed that Russia stores missiles and possibly Iranian Shahed suicide drones at the Kursk nuclear power plant that it uses in its attacks against Ukraine.
In fact, the city of Kurchatov has already been the target of drone attacks and sabotage groups several times. After the earlier attacks, the Russian Foreign Ministry accused the Ukrainian authorities of “nuclear terrorism.”
This Friday there was also another Ukrainian attack with a drone that was heading to Moscow. Russian anti-aircraft defenses intercepted it and the remains of it fell near the commuter town of Lyubertsi, southeast of the Russian capital.
The attack again caused restrictions at Moscow’s Vnukovo and Domodedovo airports.
The mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin, thanked the military “for not letting them spoil the Day of Knowledge”, the name it receives in Russia on September 1, when the new academic year begins.
According to the RBK newspaper, since the start of the Russian military intervention in Ukraine, Russian regional authorities have reported attacks and drone appearances more than 500 times. It was precisely Kursk, which borders the Ukrainian province of Sumi, the first region of Russia attacked by Ukrainian drones, on June 19, 2022.
