Ukraine is going after Russian soldiers who shoot at or use Europe's biggest nuclear power plant as a base to shoot from. This is because the G7 nations, afraid of a nuclear disaster, have asked Moscow to pull its forces out of the plant.
Ukraine and Russia have both said that the Zaporizhzhia facility in southern Ukraine has been shelled more than once. At the start of the war, Russian troops took over the station.
"Every Russian soldier who shoots at the plant or uses it as cover must know that he becomes a special target for our intelligence agents, our special services, and our army," President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a Saturday evening speech.
Zelenskiy said over and over that Russia was using the plant as nuclear blackmail, but he never gave any proof.
The plant takes up most of the south side of a big lake on the Dnipro river. Russian forces on the other side of the river are heavily bombing Ukrainian forces who are in charge of the towns and cities on the other side.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the president of Ukraine, said that Russia "hit the part of the nuclear power plant that makes the energy that powers the south of Ukraine."
"The goal is to cut us off from the plant and say it was done by the Ukrainian army," Podolyak said on Twitter (NYSE:TWTR).
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which wants to check out the plant, has said that if fighting doesn't stop, there could be a nuclear disaster. Nuclear experts worry that fighting could hurt the spent fuel pools or the reactors at the plant.
Antonio Guterres, the head of the United Nations, has called for a demilitarized zone to be set up around the Zaporizhzhia facility, which is still run by technicians from Ukraine.
Kyiv has been saying for weeks that it is planning a counteroffensive to take back the provinces of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, which Russia took when it invaded on February 24 and which are still in Russian hands. These provinces make up the largest part of the land that Russia still has.
Russian and Ukrainian forces fought in the past for control of Chornobyl, the site of the world's worst nuclear accident, which is still radioactive. This made people worry about a disaster.
DIPLOMATIC RIFT DEEPENS
Russia's invasion, which it calls a "special military operation" to demilitarize and "denazify" its smaller neighbor, has brought relations between Moscow and Washington to a low point, and Russia has said it may cut ties.
Ukraine's Western allies, led by the US, have given Ukraine weapons to protect itself and harsh sanctions against Russia.
On Friday, a senior Russian official said that Moscow had told Washington that if the U.S. Senate passed a law calling Russia a "state sponsor of terrorism," diplomatic ties would be severely damaged and could even be broken.
TASS reported on Saturday that a top official in the Russian foreign ministry said that if the US seized Russian assets, it would end all relations between the two countries.
AlexanderDarchiev, head of the ministry's North American Department, said, "We warn the Americans that such actions will hurt bilateral relations in a way that won't go away, which is neither in their interest nor in ours." He didn't make it clear what assets he was talking about.
Darchiev said that the U.S. had become so powerful in Ukraine that "Americans are becoming more and more directly involved in the conflict."
The United States and Europe have turned down Ukraine's request to set up a "no-fly zone" to protect its skies from Russian missiles and warplanes. They don't want to be pulled right into the war.
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