Ahmet Gençtürk
24 February 2022•Update: 24 February 2022
ANKARA
Russian forces are trying to seize the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the north, the Ukrainian president said Thursday.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Twitter that Ukrainian soldiers are fighting the attack on the plant.
With an obvious reference to the importance of the site, where a devastating nuclear accident occurred in 1986, he said: “This is a declaration of war against the whole of Europe.”
Zelenskyy noted that he informed the Swedish prime minister on the development.
The Donbas crisis and Russia's military intervention
Ukraine’s February 2014 “Maidan revolution” led to President Viktor Yanukovych fleeing the country and a pro-Western government coming to power.
Russia then illegally annexed Crimea, and separatists declared “independence” in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Donbas, eastern Ukraine, both of which have large ethnic Russian populations.
Clashes took place between Russian-backed separatist forces and the Ukrainian army. The 2014 and 2015 Minsk agreements, signed in Moscow with the intervention of Western powers, tried to stop the conflict but cease-fire violations continued and as of February, 14,000 people had lost their lives in the conflict.
Late last year, Russia made headlines with the deployments of tens of thousands of troops on the border with Ukraine.
The US said Russia was preparing for an invasion, but Moscow denied it. Despite the threat of Western sanctions, Moscow recognized the separatist governments in the Donbas regions as 'independent' on Monday, Feb. 21 and began a military intervention Feb. 24 into Ukrainian territory.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said the operation's aims are to protect people “subjected to genocide” by Kyiv and to “demilitarize and denazify” Ukraine. He called on the Ukrainian army to lay down its arms.
