Alexander De Croo, Administrator of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), on Thursday warned in an interview that frequent drone attacks on Chernobyl ‘“We are really gambling with the safety of millions of people” and call for urgent international action to prevent a nuclear catastrophe.
When De Croo visited the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and witnessed first-hand the damage caused by the drone attack, he warned the following:
Whether it was a deliberate attack (on the Chernobyl power plant) or an accident, that is unacceptable. Ensuring that no drones fly over this location is one way to prevent something like this from happening.
De Croo continued that Russia had not acted in accordance with international humanitarian law and stressed that civilian infrastructure must be protected from attack; “Even in war there are rules that must be followed.” He told a reporter that “the intensity of the (Russian) attacks really shows that the front line has moved beyond the eastern part of the country and that today it is everywhere.”
UNDP and associated organizations are working to provide electricity to 6.6 million Ukrainians. However, De Croo acknowledged that “it is clear that (the aid provided by UNDP) is never enough at the moment and Ukraine is heading for a very difficult winter.” While for the UNDP ‘r“Restoring infrastructure does not mean waiting for the end of the war”, the road ahead is still long, with the UNDP estimating that repairing the damage to civilian infrastructure already caused amounts to $600 billion.
Russia has repeatedly been involved in alleged human rights violations since the invasion of Ukraine began. Human Rights Watch (HRW) recently criticized Russia’s indiscriminate cluster munition attacks on residential areas in Kiev. This was estimated by the UN human rights monitoring mission in Ukraine 437 civilians were killed in July 2026 alone, the highest number of civilian deaths since the start of the war.
In 1986, the Chernobyl disaster occurred Level 7 nuclear eventoccurred after a reactor spun out of control during a poorly conducted routine safety test, subsequently leading to a massive explosion that killed 31 people. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) later predicted that about 100% of the radiation released from Chernobyl’s smoke could result 4,000 cancer-related deaths among the people who were in the vicinity of the tragedy.
Between 1991 and 2005, the IAEA said there were at least 5,000 documented cases Thyroid cancer in children under 14 years old who lived in Belarus and Ukraine, linking the sharp increase in cases to high levels of radiation from the power plant.
