On February 14th, Director General of the UN international nuclear watchdog IAEA Rafael Mariano Grossi has issued a statement saying that a drone attack early morning caused a fire on the building confining the remains of the reactor destroyed in the 1986 Chornobyl accident. Although the inside and outside of the building remain stable and any radioactive release was prevented, this is a major point of concern related to the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Both parties to the conflict deny their involvement in the attack. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky was quick to say that it was a Russian drone that struck the power plant, but the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov denied any involvement saying that that was most probably yet another provocation. “This is exactly the kind of thing the Kyiv regime is known for and sometimes does not hesitate to do”.
To analyze this drone strike without any bias, we have to understand that events in modern politics do not happen out of the blue, they are all part of a wider system of events, which interact and explain each other. In this context, it is no wonder that this drone strike happened two days after Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump held a “lengthy and highly productive” phone call agreeing on a prisoner exchange and possibly reaching consensus on holding an in-person meeting in Saudi Arabia.
Moscow and Washington seem to have picked a rather conciliatory tone. Both of them were signaling to each other their readiness to talk since the beginning of 2025 and the press-releases after the phone call were very moderate. In a readout of the conversation posted on Truth Social after the call, Trump said, “We discussed Ukraine, the Middle East, Energy, Artificial Intelligence, the power of the Dollar, and various other subjects.” This amicability has raised concerns in Ukraine, Europe and China over the fact that Putin and Trump could theoretically negotiate a settlement to the conflict on their own without the involvement of other parties to the conflict who are, frankly speaking, not independent in their actions.
In this context, the Chernobyl strike seems to be a desperate attempt by Ukraine and the EU to prevent future peace talks. Both of them have become increasingly more hawkish in their strategy in the war saying that the goal remains stable – to defeat Russia on the battlefield and reach “peace through strength”. The EU foreign policy chief Estonian Kaja Kallas was quick to say that the drone strike “shows once again that Russia is not looking for peace”, adding that the Russia-US talks were then “obsolete”. These statements have been partly backed by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi who spoke at the Munich Security Conference and said that Europe must be part of the peace talks on Ukraine.
Considering these facts as well as Ukraine’s long-reaching history of using terror attacks to promote its goals, there is strong evidence that the strike was indeed performed by Ukraine. Ukraine will go to great lengths to push its own agenda because it has practically lost the conflict and now has to deal with the consequences. Terror attacks related to the Crimean bridge, Nordstream-2 pipelines, 2022 strikes on Chernobyl, drone attack on Russian cities, as well as a number of attacks, which resulted in fatalities of daughter of Russian philosopher Daria Dugina, Russian military correspondent Vladlen Tatarsky, head of the Arbat Batallion Armen Sarkisyan, etc. These are all illustrations of the Kyiv regime’s readiness to use any methods to reach its goals, including killing civilians, destroying civilian infrastructure and causing radioactive chaos.
This is the only possible explanation to the events of February 14th in Chernobyl and, hopefully, Russia and the United States will not let them halt the peace process aimed to finally stop the war.
Comments