'The consequences of the sudden disappearance of the water in the resevoir for everyone are really bad'
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00:00 Europe's largest nuclear power plant is right in the zone where the Ukrainians
00:06 are mounting this counter offensive of course a concern for everyone.
00:12 Oh absolutely I mean I think the concern about the power plant only increases
00:17 although immediate worries that the draining of the reservoir could lead to
00:21 a meltdown because there wouldn't be enough water to cool it were quickly put
00:25 to rest by people who understand how these things work it doesn't need
00:28 cooling when it's not working it's not generating electricity at the moment on
00:32 the other hand if there were to be some kind of accident or explosion I guess it
00:36 would have come in handy to have a reservoir of water nearby and now that
00:40 reservoir is gone actually I went to see it today a bit south of Zaporizhia here
00:45 in Zaporizhia you can see the water level in the river has gone down but you
00:48 drive half an hour south and there's just flat mud where there once was a
00:53 lake I mean there once was a lake there was a lake a week ago it's really very
00:57 very striking and the consequences of the sudden disappearance of the water in
01:03 the reservoir for everyone in the region are really really bad.
01:07 More broadly Gulliver when you were down there what did the locals tell you how
01:11 it's their feeling about the counter offensive?
01:15 Well I think that the people I spoke to had somewhat mixed feelings or perhaps
01:22 they were a bit afraid that something you quite often encounter in Ukrainian
01:26 villages is that people are a bit worried about what side they ought to
01:29 appear to be on when they meet foreign journalists and they weren't quite sure
01:33 what to say some ladies that we spoke to perhaps because they fear being occupied
01:38 by Russia of course the front line is not that far away at the moment the
01:41 Ukrainians are counter-attacking but what if it goes wrong and the Russians
01:45 end up occupying the area south of Zaporizhia where I was today so we had
01:50 some people who were sort of trying to hedge their views in a way if I can put
01:54 it that way but I also met a lady whose son was fighting in the Ukrainian army
01:58 who you know said she was pinning all her hopes on this counter offensive on
02:03 its success but also of course terribly terribly worried about her son she said
02:08 she managed not to speak to him every day but almost every day she would at
02:12 least get a missed call from him and the fact that her phone would ring but even
02:16 if the connection where he is is not good enough to actually speak to him at
02:19 least she'd know from the fact that her phone rang and it was his number that
02:22 showed up that he was still alive in that same village I counted four fresh
02:27 graves of Ukrainian soldiers recently killed in combat and that's just in one
02:32 small village south of Zaporizhia