Russia-Ukraine war: Brutal battle erupts near Europe's largest nuclear power plant

Two villages near the Ukrainian border were evacuated after a fire at a munitions depot within Russia, an official said. As both sides traded accusations of fighting near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine, two civilians were wounded by Russian shelling. Located near Ukraine's northeastern border in the Russian Belgorod region, the fire struck a munitions storage building late Thursday.

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Timonovo and Soloti are home to roughly 1,100 people, and they are located about 25 kilometres from the border. According to Belgorod's regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov, nobody was wounded.

The blaze occurred in the Crimean Peninsula, a piece of land in the Black Sea that Russia captured from Ukraine in 2014, only days after another weapons dump there had detonated.

Reports of the destruction of nine Russian jets at an airfield in Crimea last week demonstrate both the Russians' weakness and the Ukrainians' ability to strike well beyond enemy lines.

The Ukrainian government has refrained from making any public accusations of guilt. Russia has blamed 'sabotage' for the explosions in Crimea, while President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has hinted to Ukrainian assaults behind enemy lines.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said in televised comments on Friday that statements from Ukrainian authorities regarding targeting infrastructure in Crimea represent  “an escalation of the conflict openly encouraged by the United States and its NATO allies.”

Ryabkov said Russian officials had warned the US against such actions in phone calls with high-level members of the Biden administration, adding that “deep and open US involvement’ in the war in Ukraine ‘effectively puts the US on the brink of becoming a party to the conflict”.

While recent events have taken place, a Western official has said that the battle is at a "near operational halt," with neither side able to launch significant offensives.

Later on Friday, a Ukrainian official said that Russian bombardment of Ukrainian settlements near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear facility had injured two citizens. This was the latest in a series of allegations that Russia had shelled Ukrainian communities in the preceding several weeks.

Ukrainian-held Nikopol and Marhanets are on either side of the Dnieper River from the nuclear power facility.  Kyiv and Moscow persisted in blaming one other for the shelling that occurred close to Europe's biggest nuclear power facility.

Because of the Russian army's "frequent bombardment," a senior official at the Ukrainian presidential office warned reporters, "the fear of an environmental disaster on a global scale" persists.

The deputy head of the presidential office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, said at the same briefing that Russian shelling had damaged "more than 3,700 infrastructure assets" in the area around the facility. This included heating, power, gas, and water supply systems.

In his Friday night speech, Zelenskyy again mentioned the Zaporizhzhia plant and its precarious state of affairs.

“If Russia's radiation blackmail continues, this summer may go down in the history of various European countries as one of the most tragic of all time. Because not a single instruction at any nuclear power plant in the world provides a procedure in case a terrorist state turns a nuclear power plant into a target,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin said that Russian President Vladimir Putin told French counterpart Emmanuel Macron in their first phone conversation since May 28 that Ukrainian shelling around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant “raised the threat of a large-scale catastrophe that could lead to radioactive contamination of large territories”.

The Zaporizhzhia nuclear facility in Ukraine's south has been controlled by Russian forces since shortly after the invasion began on February 24.

(With Inputs from PTI)