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Rosatom believes IAEA assistance is crucial to ensuring security of Ukraine’s NPPs

It is essential to ensure the IAEA has the full information about the current events, chief of Russia’s nuclear power corporation Alexey Likhachev pointed out

MOSCOW, April 1. /TASS/. The chief of Russia’s nuclear power corporation Rosatom, Alexey Likhachev, has stressed the importance of providing full information about the current events at Ukraine’s nuclear power facilities to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Rosatom will furnish all necessary assistance in this respect, he said after a meeting with IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi in Kaliningrad on Friday.

"It is essential to ensure the IAEA has the full information about the current events and to enable the nuclear power plants’ specialists and personnel to do their job in these extremely complicated conditions. We have identified guidelines for cooperation and day-to-day interaction," Likhachev said. In particular, he stressed the IAEA’s highest professionalism.

"In the wake of this conversation I would like to stress the highest professionalism of the agency, its leader and the entire delegation involved in this work, as well as the balanced and depoliticized approach to events and the exclusive focus of attention and efforts on nuclear security matters. Security, security and security. These three issues were the agenda of our negotiations in past few hours," Likhachev said.

Rafael Grossi thanked Likhachev for cooperation and partnership. He stressed the importance of joint efforts by the IAEA as a global nuclear institute, Russia and Ukraine in maintaining nuclear security even in these extremely adverse circumstances. This is necessary for reducing the risk of nuclear accidents to zero, he said.

The IAEA missions will start inspecting Ukraine’s nuclear facilities next week to probe into their safety. Grossi said the task would be to go ahead with joint work to make sure Ukraine’s nuclear industry facilities were under control. He confirmed that the situation was under control by and large for the time being, but certain things required clarification. Asked about Russian specialists held at the Rovno nuclear power plant, Grossi said that this issue was being resolved positively and he was very glad about that.

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Ukraine crisis Ukraine Nuclear energy Rosatom IAEA

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