(Bloomberg) -- The United Nations atomic watchdog held an emergency meeting in Vienna to discuss the increasing risk of an accident at a Russian-occupied atomic power plant in Ukraine. 

International Atomic Energy Agency diplomats convened on Thursday to discuss safety at Europe’s biggest nuclear facility. The discussions followed a string of armed drone assaults on the site just south of the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia. 

“It indicates an apparent readiness to continue these attacks, despite the grave dangers they pose to nuclear safety and security and our repeated calls for military restraint” IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said. “Whoever is behind them, they are playing with fire.”

Though the attacks didn’t seriously compromise reactor safety, they represent a “new and gravely dangerous front of the war,” Grossi told Thursday’s extraordinary meeting, adding he’ll travel next week to New York in order to convey his rising concern to the UN Security Council. 

Russia’s state-owned Rosatom Corp. took control over Zaporizhzhia — home to six reactors built to supply a fifth of Ukraine’s electricity — in September 2022, seven months into Moscow’s ongoing invasion. The IAEA formally demanded Russia return the plant to Ukraine a month ago, citing concern over deteriorating safety. 

Read More: Russia Destroys Largest Power Plant in Ukraine’s Kyiv Region

Russia is seeking a formal IAEA finding that Ukraine is behind the strikes. Kyiv says its forces are innocent and blames the Kremlin for staging a provocation. No formal resolutions of censure were tabled before the meeting began.

Underscoring the seriousness of the attacks, the IAEA emergency meeting is the first called to discuss Zaporizhzhia in more than two years. Drone strikes on April 7 and April 9 hit the side of a reactor building and appeared to target communication links, according to monitors stationed at the plant. 

The IAEA circulated a Russian diplomatic note showing inspectors assessing the damages. They appear to display spent bullet casings, a blood-stained pavement and damaged infrastructure. 

Ukraine is home to history’s biggest nuclear-power disaster, the 1986 meltdown at Chernobyl under the Soviet Union that rendered more than 1,000 square miles uninhabitable. 

 

 

(Updates with Grossi in the fourth paragraph)

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