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President Biden and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky called on Russia Thursday to give up control of a nuclear power plant Moscow’s forces captured earlier this year and allow United Nations inspectors access so they could determine whether the situation is stable.
A White House readout of the call was released as reports indicated that the Zaporizhzhia plant had been temporarily disconnected from the Ukrainian grid because of fire damage that caused a blackout, raising fears of another catastrophe like the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown.
It was the first time Zaporizhzhia was cut off from the grid.
The fires damaged a transmission line carrying outgoing energy from the plant, Europe’s largest, leading to the outage, said Yevgeny Balitsky, the Russian-installed regional governor.
Two reactors went offline, he said, but workers had managed to restore one of them and service was restored.
Ukraine has warned that Russian troops who captured the plant in March have been holding the facility hostage while storing weapons there and using it as a base from which to launch attacks.
Moscow has accused Kyiv of creating a dangerous situation by shelling the plant.
