NEW YORK, March 23. /TASS/. Talks to establish a demilitarized zone around the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant have been halted and the IAEA is instead pushing for other ways to safeguard the plant, IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi said on Wednesday.
The chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency was asked at a workshop at the US Council on Foreign Relations if his idea to establish a demilitarized zone around the ZNPP gained sufficient international support.
"We are not talking about a demilitarized zone. We are very aware of the added complications that that would bring, especially in an area of active combat. This would be extremely difficult to verify," Grossi responded. "So, we're not looking into that."
Grossi said the idea now is to secure commitments "not to attack the plant or not to use the plant to project attacks."
He said talks about what a demilitarized zone could look like lasted for seven or eight months.
"We have been discussing with both sides <…> different sizes and shapes and distances. And I came to the conclusion that the territoriality will be something that for different reasons for the Ukrainians could also be seen as legitimization of the Russian presence and so on and so forth," the IAEA chief said.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said earlier that an agreement on establishing a demilitarized zone around the ZNPP was within reach, but Ukraine rejected it. An IAEA mission led by its Director General Rafael Grossi traveled to the ZNPP in September 2022 and left several agency employees there as observers. Afterward, the agency published a report calling for the establishment of a safety zone around the ZNPP to prevent accidents arising from hostilities.