A DRONE armed with a warhead hit the outer protective shell of Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear plant early today, damaging the structure and briefly starting a fire, in an attack Kiev blamed on Russia. The Kremlin denied it was responsible.

Radiation levels at the shuttered plant in the Kiev region, site of the world's worst nuclear accident, have not increased, according to the UN. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said the strike did not breach the plant’s inner containment shell.

The IAEA did not attribute blame, saying only that its team stationed at the site heard an explosion and was informed that a drone had struck the shell.

Fighting around nuclear power plants has repeatedly raised fears of a nuclear catastrophe during three years of war, particularly in a country where many vividly remember living through the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, which killed at least 30 people and spewed radioactive fallout over much of the Northern Hemisphere.

The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which is Europe’s biggest, has occasionally been hit by drones during the war without causing significant damage.

The strike came two days after President Donald Trump upended US policy on Ukraine, saying he would meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss ending the war. The move looks set to sideline Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, as well as European governments, in any peace talks.

Meanwhile, Mr Trump claimed on Thursday that he wants to restart nuclear arms control talks with Russia and China and that eventually he hopes all three countries could agree to cut their massive defence budgets in half.

“There’s no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons,” he said. “We already have so many. You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over. And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and they’re building nuclear weapons.”

Mr Trump pulled the US out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), a cold war-era deal between then US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, that banned missiles with ranges of 310 to 3,400 miles.

According to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Russia has the most nuclear weapons, with 5,889 warheads, and the US has 5,224.

China, far behind in third, possesses 410, France in fourth has 290, and Britain in fifth holds 225.