KYIV, Ukraine (AFP)— Four more ships loaded with grain set off from Ukrainian ports on Sunday, as Moscow and Kyiv blamed each other for a new strike at a Russian-occupied nuclear plant.

Odessa regional authorities, meanwhile, announced that another two grain shipments were due to leave on Monday.

Kyiv’s infrastructure ministry wrote on Telegram on Sunday that a convoy of Ukrainian supplies had left, with three ships departing from Chornomorsk and one from Odessa.

The Mustafa Necati, the Star Helena, the Glory and the Riva Wind were carrying “around 170,000 tonnes of agriculture-related merchandise”, it said.

The spokesman for the Odessa regional military administration said early Monday morning that the MV Sacura and MV Arizona had also been cleared to set sail.

It would “transport more than 59,000 tonnes of food via the maritime humanitarian corridor today”, he said.

– ‘A suicidal thing’ –

Moscow and Kyiv traded accusations on Sunday over who bombed the Zaporizhzhia nuclear site in southern Ukraine.

Europe’s largest atomic power complex has been under Russian control since the early days of the February 24 invasion.

Recent fighting at the plant has prompted the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), to warn of “the very real risk of a nuclear disaster”.

Russia’s occupying authorities in the town of Enerhodar, where the plant is located, said the Ukrainian army overnight “carried out a strike with a cluster bomb fired from an Uragan multiple rocket launcher”.

The projectiles fell “within 400 metres of a working reactor” and in a “zone storing used nuclear fuel”, Russia’s state news agency TASS reported.

Ukrainian state nuclear energy company Enerhoatom, however, said the “Russian occupiers once again fired rockets at the nuclear power plant (and) its host town, Enerhodar”. One worker there had been hospitalised with shrapnel wounds, it added.

AFP was not able to confirm the allegations from an independent source.

Without assigning blame, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned the strike in remarks from Tokyo on Monday morning.

“Any attack to a nuclear plant is a suicidal thing. I hope that those attacks will end, and at the same time I hope that the IAEA will be able to access the plant,” he said.

On Saturday, Enerhoatom had already said parts of the facility had been “seriously damaged” by military strikes the previous day, forcing the shutdown of one of its reactors.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in his nightly address Sunday, called for a “principled response” from the international community.

Evoking the possibility that the plant was hit causing the release of a toxic cloud, he added: “No one will stop the wind that will spread the radioactive contamination.”