US: Credible reports staff at Chernobyl nuclear plant have been taken hostage

The White House is expressing outrage at “credible reports” from Ukrainian officials that the staff at the shuttered Chernobyl nuclear plant have been taken hostage by Russian troops.

Press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday that “we condemn it and we request their release.”

Psaki says the US has no assessment on the state of the plant where radioactivity is still leaking decades after the worst nuclear disaster in history. But she says hostage taking could hamper efforts to maintain the nuclear facility and is “incredibly alarming and greatly concerning.”

An operator’s arm-chair covered with plastic sits in an empty control room of the 3rd reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, in Chernobyl, Ukraine, on April 20, 2018. Among the most worrying developments on an already shocking day, as Russia invaded Ukraine on Thursday, was warfare at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, where radioactivity is still leaking from history’s worst nuclear disaster 36 years ago.(AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky, File)

Psaki spoke after Alyona Shevtsova, an adviser to the commander of Ukraine’s Ground Forces, wrote on Facebook that the staff at the Chernobyl plant had been “taken hostage” when Russian troops seized the facility.