I know I'm steelmanning like a crazy person right now, but a valid reason for Russia to seize those power plants might be to prevent Ukrainians from using them as huge dirty bombs in a desperate last strike.
But yeah, it was a stupid theory, too bad I cannot delete it anymore. At least it triggered better theories in this thread, though.
The Ukrainians are fighting for their own land. I don't think that there's a single one of them that would deliberately cause another Chernobyl (remember that they have some experience with what happens when reactors go kablooey).
But they seem to be quite persistent, in not just just rolling over and letting the Russians have their way. I suspect that they've got plenty of other nasty little surprises in store.
One of the things that the last 50 years' worth of guerrilla wars has been, is an object lesson on how to do asymmetric warfare against technologically-advanced, and overwhelming armies.
I suspect that every military in the world has been taking notes.
If they are going to “find” evidence to support Putin’s claim of an offensive Ukrainian nuclear weapons program supported by the US, presumably it will be at one of Ukraine’s actual nuclear reactors.
While it's not a hard limit on propaganda, actually having physical control makes a story about such a find more plausible.
It seems awful transparent, when they do this “false flag” stuff, but I think they are playing to a domestic audience.
I think the US managed to get and share enough intelligence to forestall most effect of the false flag stuff they wanted to use for international justification, leaving them with basically “But NATO...” on that front.
At the same time, the solid international opposition and the sanctions impact make the domestic propaganda front more critical, and there's a lot more that they can do on that front given the degree of control they have over domestic information channels.
The real-time visibility of the domestic propaganda probably further aggravates the international situation, but I think they probably have written that off except direct intervention, which they think, probably correctly, is deterred by their nuclear arsenal.
Take a place like syria, it went from a centralized government to a heap of insurgencies and many sides killing people en-masse.
For example, China Nuclear Corporation tries to buy Russian part of nuclear fuel facility almost built in Smolino[0], central Ukraine.