On November 9, during the discussion of the annual report on the work of the IAEA at the meeting of the UN General Assembly, the representative of the Russian delegation, Alexander Shevchenko, stated that the alleged aggressor state “is ready, upon request, to provide access to nuclear facilities in Sevastopol as part of the implementation of IAEA safeguards.”
This thesis, without comment, was spread by Russian propaganda, after which some aggressor-controlled “Crimean media” began to declare “admission to military facilities” and allegedly “untold generosity” in the form of “surrender-light”, even indicating that “the Kremlin’s unilateral concessions are regarded today not as a gesture of goodwill, but as a forced reaction to a series of defeats in the war”.
However, this aggressor’s statement to the UN should be considered primarily as a provocation, and the mentioned “Crimean media” is obviously “not aware” that the only nuclear facility, the presence of which Russian Federation does not deny in the Crimea, is a civilian seized in 2014 at that time educational nuclear reactor of the specialized Sevastopol Institute.
It is about him, as an unsafe and uncontrolled nuclear facility seized by the invaders, since 2014 that the delegation of Ukraine has consistently declared in the IAEA.
Let us recall that since 2014, for all possible visits to the occupied Crimea by international organizations’ officials, the Kremlin has set one and obviously impossible condition – the criminal “recognition” of the supposedly “Russian status of the peninsula”, which, naturally, no intergovernmental structure could agree to.
Further, in 2022, blackmailing the world with a nuclear threat from the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant captured by Russian troops, the aggressor nevertheless agreed to the “IAEA mission” to the plant, realizing that it is in this international structure that Russian influence is quite strong.
Now the Russian authorities may start playing the “Sevastopol nuclear combination”, in which, perhaps, the IAEA delegation will not go to the Crimea, refusing to fulfill the criminal demands of the Russians for the “recognition of the peninsula”.
Then the Russian occupiers can commit all sorts of provocations at the facilities located in Sevastopol and declare “emergency situations”, including fake “rocket attacks and drone attacks” on the civilian nuclear facility of Ukraine seized in 2014.
If the IAEA delegation arrives in the Crimea, without any criminal political “confessions”, then the invaders will try to use it as a tool to “legitimize” the fake Sevastopol “administration” and other structures controlled by the aggressor, such as the fictitious “Sevastopol State University”.
In this scenario, provocations by the aggressor with allegedly “drones and shelling” of the Sevastopol reactor cannot be ruled out either.
