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Five technicians secured by wires worked near the curved top of an arched steel structure that loomed the equivalent of 40 stories high, trying to extinguish the last bits of smoldering insulation left by a drone strike. It was snowing; the temperature was below freezing; the steel was covered with ice.<\/p>\n
The hole from the strike was quite large, about 540 square feet, and dangerous for many reasons \u2014 primarily because it jeopardized the safety of the protective shell covering Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history.<\/p>\n
The breach was also deliberate, Ukrainian officials said, punched through at 1:59 a.m. on Friday by a Russian drone with a high-explosive warhead. Nuclear experts called it one of the most potentially dangerous attacks since Russia invaded Ukraine almost three years ago.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Despite the strike, radiation levels at Chernobyl remained normal on Friday. Far below that arched hood, the concrete-and-steel \u201csarcophagus\u201d encasing the reactor and highly radioactive debris held. No one was injured or killed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Still, Ukrainian authorities described the strike as audacious, hitting a nuclear power plant on the eve of a gathering of world leaders in Munich and risking a disaster.<\/p>\n
The Kremlin denied that Russia\u2019s military had struck the plant. Its spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, implied that it was some kind of fraud by the Ukrainians. \u201cThe Russian military does not do this,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Workers extinguished the fire early Friday, but insulation still burned as of the late afternoon, said Andriy Danyk, the head of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine, as he stood in the median of a parking lot in front of Reactor No. 4. But the hole will take months to fix, he added, and it\u2019s not yet clear all the work that has to be done for it to be to sealed.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have an amazing, terrible situation, because that\u2019s not supposed to happen,\u201d said Shaun Burnie, a senior nuclear specialist at Greenpeace who has monitored nuclear power plants in Ukraine since 2022 and who visited Chernobyl on Friday. \u201cIt was never designed for a deliberate military attack. We\u2019ve been investigating Russian war crimes, and this looks like another one.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
On Friday, Ukrainian officials showed journalists bits of the drone they say hit the plant \u2014 a Shahed, typically deployed by Russia and stamped with the code of 15480. They displayed it near a radioactivity warning sign, as if to prove the seriousness of the attack.<\/p>\n
An initial analysis by McKenzie Intelligence Services, a British consulting company, that was commissioned Friday by Greenpeace, said video footage showed some minor internal damage to the facility. The analysis also said that drone engine debris \u201cis almost certainly\u201d the remains of a piston engine that powers the Shahed drone, supplied by Iran to the Russians.<\/p>\n
The analysis also said that the drone\u2019s system is guided by preset coordinates for an intended target. \u201cThis would indicate the almost certain deliberate targeting\u201d of the plant by the Russians, the analysis added.<\/p>\n
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine told journalists at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that the drone was flying at an altitude of about 278 feet, which is undetectable by radar.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n