by Finian Cunningham
June 04, 2026
from Strategic-Culture Website








The West's "victim" regime

is trying to blow up Europe with a nuclear catastrophe

using EU and NATO funding and weapons...

The biggest civilian nuclear power station in Europe was hit for the first time in a direct air strike... and the Western "news" media gave zero reporting on the incident, even though the damage could have had catastrophic consequences for the whole of Europe.

Since Russian forces took over the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) in March 2022, the huge facility has come under repeated drone and missile attack from the NATO-backed Ukrainian regime.

The latest strike on May 30, however, explosively penetrated one of the turbine halls in the central part of the plant, not the periphery as in previous attacks.

There were no injuries nor radiation fallout, according to Russia's state-owned atomic energy company, Rosatom.

But Rosatom's chief Alexey Likhachev warned that if the turbine hall had sustained more serious damage, there was a real danger of cooling systems failing and the nuclear reactor going into meltdown, resulting in a continental radiation disaster on a scale reminiscent of the Chernobyl crisis in 1986.

This game of nuclear blackmail and terrorism by the Ukrainian regime is not new.

For four years, the Western media and the UN nuclear inspectors have played a charade of pretending that the perpetrator of the strikes on the ZNPP is disputed.

 

They peddle ridiculous Ukrainian claims that it is Russian forces who are firing artillery at a nuclear plant that the Russians control.

The Ukrainian puppet president, Vladimir Zelensky, at one point had the brass neck to say that strikes on the ZNPP would stop if Russia gave back control of the plant.

This is the same regime that used energy blackmail against EU states, Hungary and Slovakia, threatening to cut off oil pipelines to these countries if they did not lift their vetoes on doling out billions in loans to Ukraine.

What's more reprehensible is that the Western news media do not even play the charade anymore.

The Kiev regime hit a central unit in the ZNPP last weekend, risking a nuclear catastrophe for Europe, and the media gave no reporting on the incident, not even a distorted report trying to cast blame on the Russian side.

The criminal recklessness cannot be overstated.

A nuclear plant is deliberately being attacked by a corrupt regime with NATO weapons and doubtless NATO targeting intelligence, putting millions of people across Europe in grave danger, and the Western media serves to cover it up.

Of course, we should not be surprised.

This is the same media that has covered up the NeoNazi nature of the Kiev regime, its obscene corruption and embezzlement of Western public money, and its deliberate terror attacks on Russian civilians.

On May 22, one of the worst atrocities was the deliberate air strike by the NATO-backed regime on a college dormitory in Starobelsk, Lugansk, killing 21 students, most of whom were teenage girls.

All the American and European corporate-controlled news media gave minimal coverage of the massacre.

To mention just two outlets, CNN and the BBC,

refused a Russian government invitation to join other international news services to witness the aftermath of the horror.

 

Many of the young victims died under rubble from the repeated waves of explosions.

 

The circumstances on the ground verified that the college was deliberately targeted and that there were no military installations anywhere in the vicinity.

The Starobelsk atrocity has been mentioned in subsequent Western reports, but only in the briefest and vaguest terms, and in such a way that the incident is ascribed to Russian government claims that "cannot be verified."

The Western reports highlight the Kiev regime's denials.

This week, Russia conducted massive air strikes on Kiev and other Ukrainian locations, as it had warned it would do, in retaliation for the "act of terrorism" at Starobelsk.

Russia fired scores of hypersonic and ballistic missiles and hundreds of drones. The hypersonic missiles cannot be intercepted by NATO air defenses, including the U.S.-made Patriot system.

The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed that its strikes only targeted military centers, infrastructure, and NATO decision-making sites, and that all of its targets were hit.

Russia said it does not target civilians.

A BBC report typifies the Western media norm.

On June 2, the British state-owned outlet headlined:

"Ukraine rescuers pull dead from rubble after Russian strikes kill 22 people."

The BBC and other Western media reported in gruesome detail about people being pulled from the rubble in Kiev, Dnipro (Dnepropetrovsk), and other places.

The Western media cite the claims of the Ukrainian authorities about the dead and injured without qualification.

 

The figures are taken as fact.

So, too, are the claims by the Ukrainian regime that apartment blocks were deliberately hit by Russian missiles.

No questions were raised that the apartment buildings could have been hit by Ukrainian air defense missiles that are unable to intercept Russian hypersonic weapons, and therefore must fall somewhere.

It would not be the first time that Ukrainian air defense missiles have gone astray and hit their own buildings, killing civilians.

Moreover, the BBC and other Western outlets reported the Russian strikes without the all-important background that the strikes were in retaliation and in legitimate self-defense to the atrocity in Starobelsk.

Where the BBC made a brief mention, it reported thus:

"The Kremlin said on Tuesday [June 2] it was carrying out the 'systematic strikes' it had pledged after accusing [Ukraine] of a deadly attack on a student dormitory in an occupied part of eastern Ukraine in late May."

Several things stand out about the double standard in reporting.

The Russian strikes on Ukraine and the aftermath are covered in detail with lots of condemnations from the Ukrainian regime of "Russian terrorism".

While the massacre of 21 teenage students in Starobelsk (pejoratively referred to as "Russian-occupied" territory) was largely ignored or distorted as not a crime.

Note that the alleged death tolls are similar, yet the deaths in the Russian college merit a couple of sanitized sentences, whereas those in Ukraine make top stories and headlines.

But this double standard in reporting is not merely poor journalism.

It is evidence of the Western propaganda system at work, one which falsifies the conflict, devalues and dehumanizes victims, and tries to make one side the absolute villain when in reality the side that the West is championing is the side that more accurately meets the definition of criminal terrorism.

The ultimate exposition is that the West's "victim" regime is trying to blow up Europe with a nuclear catastrophe using EU and NATO funding and weapons.

The evidence for the heinous crime is there this week. And yet the Western media is silent.

No wonder such media do not report on atrocities like those at Starobelsk. If they can't find a nuclear terror threat worth reporting, then nothing is.

Because to do so exposes the NATO war agenda and its propaganda system of lies promoting war.