Alexey Likhachev, June 8 -- The missiles and drones kept coming through Saturday and Sunday. Not at the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant itself, but at the people tasked with keeping it alive.

to grind down a city and make daily life in it feel untenable. "It is obviously a tactic used by Kiev to exhaust the people of Energodar," Likhachev told reporters.

The statement places Likhachev's language in notably direct territory. For months, Russian and IAEA officials have spoken carefully about nuclear safety threats, keeping their characterizations confined to the plant's infrastructure. Likhachev on Monday shifted the frame to the population - the workers who operate the shutdown reactors, the engineers managing cooling systems, the logisti...