WASHINGTON, July 7. /TASS/. Moscow urges the US-led West to stop the Kiev authorities from carrying out a terrorist attack on the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) as Kiev seeks to draw NATO directly into the conflict, Russian Ambassador to Washington Anatoly Antonov said on Thursday.

"We call on the curators of the Kiev regime to exercise responsibility and exert influence on their ‘wards’ in order to avoid a large-scale catastrophe. Western ruling elites should understand that the failures on the battlefield make Kiev eager to create a pretext for the deployment of the NATO contingent to Ukraine, thereby to inflate a regional conflict into World War III. American and European citizens are hardly ready to march in orderly rows to hell, into which the Zelensky government is dragging the entire planet," the envoy said, commenting on the Ukrainian government’s allegations about Russia’s plans to blow up the ZNPP. The Russian Embassy posted Antonov’s key remarks on its Telegram channel.

"Statements that Russia is preparing a provocation against the nuclear power plant it controls are absurd. Russian citizens work at the facility. IAEA experts, who cannot but know who is shelling the ZNPP, are present there on a rotational basis, too," the Russian ambassador pointed out.

"News reporters continue to pretend not to notice the obvious: from the very beginning of the special military operation, all the accusations of the Zelensky regime against us turned out to be sabotage operations of Kiev itself. Suffice it to say what happened to the Kakhovka dam, Bucha and Kramatorsk. This time stakes have grown substantially: Europe's nuclear security is at risk," Antonov stressed.

According to him, "observers are actually playing along with the criminal intentions of the Ukrainian authorities ahead of the NATO summit." "The criminal intentions are: to use a terrorist attack in order to slander Russia as a ‘nuclear terrorist;’ to divert attention from the failed counteroffensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, in which the West has invested enormous resources; to use the provocation so as to draw the Alliance directly into the conflict," the diplomat specified.

"The reactors are protected. However, besides power units there are more vulnerable infrastructure facilities: cooling systems, storage sites for fresh fuel and nuclear waste. Any projectile hit is extremely dangerous as radiation contamination of vast territories can follow," Antonov added.