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Bombed Chornobyl shelter no longer blocks radiation and needs major repair – IAEA
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2025
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Two words I'd never imagine seeing together in the same sentence
Whoever decided to do this should go toes first through a wood chipper
There are reasons that I don't use The Guardian as a default news source despite name recognition. The framing of this headline "Drone attack that Ukraine blamed on Russia" betrays a bias or a desire to hook people with biases.
I don't know, maybe I'm totally off my rocker but I don't think a country actively being invaded by a hostile force is going to attempt to essentially detonate a dirty bomb on their own soil for... checks notes international sympathy?
That's the implication being made there in the headline, that it's possible that Ukraine did it. Sure wouldn't want to piss of Russia by not taking them at their word I guess.
I think it's probably just framed that way because Russia never officially took responsibility for it, not because anyone believes Ukraine really did it
Exactly. Back when it happened, their reports on it were directly "Russian drone explodes on Chornobyl nuclear plant protective shell – video" and "Russian drone strike caused tens of millions worth of damage to Chornobyl".
But russia has since denied it was theirs, and nobody else has proven otherwise, which means anyone following journalistic guidelines can't claim that anymore - the best they can choose from are basically "Drone attack that Ukraine blamed on Russia" and "Drone attack Russia denies was theirs".
Or simply "drone attack on Ukraine". The audience can fill in the obvious perpetrator.
As mentioned above, it could be a Ukraine drone gone wrong. Or North Korean. Or Chinese. Or Alien.
I suppose at face value I was thinking maybe more like
"Shit, missed."
"Whoops!"
"Those damn Russians!!!"
But yeah sounds like a bit of BS because Russia simply didn't admit to it.
Like it or not, that’s journalism 101. You don’t make claims unless you can directly verify them, even if they seem obvious.
And if you do, you attribute to who said it. Like the UN or IAEA.
Guardian should have just omitted that blurb from the byline, TBH.
This is what I'm saying, it's a deliberately provocative blurb and it makes me wonder why they're trying to be provocative. My problems with The Guardian started with Israel/Gaza so I do eye them with a little less trust than Reuters or AP. I know guardian is biased, but I would rather their bias be consistent than seem to shift gears to create buz and speculation. I've seen other news organizations start sliding down the sensationalism pit with the same kinds of incidents.
Every news site is biased. Read them with that mind.
As an example, one of my usual sources since like 2015 is Axios. Their site is clean, lean, and they are extremely well sourced in Washington. But they recently got a big cash infusion from OpenAI. And, surprise surprise, they post a small but steady stream of Tech Bro evangelism on the side now.
RT is generally awful, but sometimes their reporting outside of Russia, where they have incentive to dig, can be good.
Hence, my bucket for Guardian is “high class liberal catnip .” They are clickbaity. That's they trend so much here on Lemmy.
They’re well sourced. Their integrity is leagues beyond, say, rawstory or dailybeast that get spammed on Lemmy. So you have to filter their stories with that in mind.
And this is pretty much what ALL written news is doing to survive, if they can. Because their competition on YouTube/Facebook/whatever is not bound to the same standards they are.
If they don’t, they die.
I used to write small articles for a tech hardware site. The owner chose to take the site down rather than chase the clickbait game.
So your problem is that it has too much journalistic integrity? It is a contested event, which extensive investigation has failed to conclusively attribute. So they must fall back on whichever claim they believe to be most credible. It’s not a points scoring exercise.
And yes, shit happens in a war. Ukraine managed to accidentally rocket strike Poland, they are quite capable of accidentally hitting Chornobyl. It isn’t out of the realm of possibility.
When one of the parties contesting the event is a lying cheating POS regime that kidnaps ukranian children for maximum psychological pain, I'm willing to believe the other party 100% of the time. Your take is what's wrong with all the things: The monsters leverage benefit of the doubt to wreak havoc.
“Accurate substantiated reporting is Fake News.” The mantra of every despot and gangster.
I don't think the existence of bias bothers me nearly as much as inconsistent application of bias. Ever since the Israel/Palestine thing with them, I haven't trusted that they won't flip the script for a dime.
Was the plant in Russian occupied territory at the time? If so, it was probably Ukraine. Did Ukraine hold the territory at the time? Then it was probably Russia.
That's very flimsy.
The alternative, that either Russia or Ukraine would intentionally bomb a nuclear containment site in territory it plans to control indefinitely, is much flimsier.
Ukraine is the nation being invaded, they don't intend to lose, they're not going to ruin vast swaths of their own land for the next century after the fight with Russia fizzles out, as most people know will happen at this rate.
Meanwhile Russia's only long-term plans for Ukraine is oil, gas and minerals. They don't need the land, they want to hurt as many citizens as possible, get to the goods and carve out territory to restore pipelines. If Russia cared at all about preserving the country, they wouldn't be leveling whole cities and killing citizens.
An act like that, even if it's just a moderately successful attempt at breaching containment, benefits only one side in this.
They're losing territory every day, if Chernobyl is Russian territory when the war fizzles out, it's likely to remain that way for quite some time.
All of these objectives made more difficult if you have a nuclear containment issue inside that territory. If you control the territory, you have no reason to use a drone to irradiate territory you need to move troops and supplies through.
I'm not saying that Russia didn't do it, idk if they held the territory at the time, but to suggest Russia somehow benefits from irradiating itself is just silly. This isn't even the first time we've seen this, see the dam, pipeline, and bridge in Russian-held territory that people tried to blame on Russia for borderline conspiratorial reasons.
I suggest reading up more on the war and geopolitics behind it if you want to create convincing arguments. A lot more.
It's the same people who ordered their soldiers to dig trenches in the irradiated soil close to Chernobyl, in the brief time they occupied it, at the start of Russia's war. As long as it's happening away from Putin and his kelptocracy circles, they don't care about consequences to friends or foes, only how it will benefit them.