President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Russian forces of carrying out what he called an “extremely vile” strike on a spent nuclear fuel storage facility near Ukraine’s Chornobyl power plant, an attack that damaged the site but did not trigger a rise in radiation levels. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which said it was briefed by Ukrainian officials, the strike caused serious damage to a fuel-reception building just metres from an area where “large amounts of nuclear material” are kept. Ukraine’s state…

Four decades after Reactor 4 exploded at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine, the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster is once again shadowed by danger. At 01:23am on 26 April 1986, an explosion tore through the reactor during a failed safety test, blasting apart the roof and sending a vast cloud of radioactive material into the atmosphere. Radiation spread west and north across Europe for days, while neighbouring Belarus absorbed the heaviest share of the fallout. Soviet authorities waited 36 hours…