UNDP warns Russian drone attacks on Chernobyl endangers the health and safety of millions News
Ingmar Runge, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
UNDP warns Russian drone attacks on Chernobyl endangers the health and safety of millions

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) administrator Alexander De Croo on Thursday warned in an interview that frequent drone attacks on Chernobyl are ‘really gambling with the safety of millions of people’, calling for urgent international action to prevent a nuclear catastrophe.

Upon visiting the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, and witnessing firsthand the damage caused by the drone strike, De Croo cautioned that:

Whether it was a deliberate attack [on the Chernobyl Power Station] or an accident, this is something which is unacceptable. Making sure that drones are not flying above that site is one way of avoiding that things like this could happen.

De Croo continued that Russia has not been acting in line with international humanitarian law, stressing that civilian infrastructures must be protected from attacks; ‘even in war, there are rules to be followed’. He told a reporter that ‘the intensity of the [Russian] attacks really show that the frontline has moved beyond the Eastern part of the country, and today, the front line is everywhere’.

The UNDP and associated organisations are working to help provide 6.6 million Ukrainians with electricity. However, De Croo admitted that ‘it is clear that at this moment [the assistance provided by the UNDP] is never enough, and Ukraine is heading into a a very difficult winter’. While for the UNDP, ‘restoring the infrastructure is not waiting for the end of the war’, the road ahead is long as it is estimated by the UNDP that repairing the damage to civilian infrastructure already caused amounts to $600 billion USD. 

Russia has continually engaged in alleged human rights violations since the start of the invasion of Ukraine. Human Rights Watch (HRW) recently criticised Russia’s indiscriminate cluster munitions attacks on residential areas in Kyiv. The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine estimated that 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, which was a level 7 nuclear event, occurred after a reactor went out of control during a poorly managed routine safety test and subsequently led to a giant explosion which took the lives of 31 people. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) later projected that the radiation released from the fumes at Chernobyl could lead to around 4,000 cancer-related deaths among the individuals who were within the radius of the tragedy.

Between the years of 1991 and 2005, the IAEA stated that there were at least 5000 documented cases of thyroid cancer in children under the age of 14 who were living in Belarus and Ukraine, linking the sharp rise in cases to severe radiation exposure from the power plant.

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