The accident that occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant in April of 1986 was the most serious nuclear incident in history. It was made worse because the Soviet government refused to acknowledge it and tried so hard to cover it up that they ended up killing untold thousands.
Chernobyl is considered one of the most radioactive places on earth. That’s why the few workers at the plant looked on in astonishment as invading Russian soldiers turned up the soil digging defensive trenches. Russian military planes also broke the exclusion zone flying overhead.
Ukrainian officials now say that the soldiers digging those trenches were digging their own graves.
Workers kept the Russians from the most dangerous areas, but in what Semenov called the worst situation he has seen in his 30 years at Chernobyl, the plant was without electricity, relying on diesel generators to support the critical work of circulating water for cooling the spent fuel rods.
“It was very dangerous to act in this way,” said Maksym Shevchuck, the deputy head of the state agency managing the exclusion zone. He was scared by it all.
Russia’s invasion marks the first time that occupying a nuclear plant was part of a nation’s war strategy, said Rebecca Harms, former president of the Greens group in the European Parliament, who has visited Chernobyl several times. She called it a “nightmare” scenario in which “every nuclear plant can be used like a pre-installed nuclear bomb.”
The plant is obviously not going to blow up, but damaging the sarcophagus housing the remains of the reactor could unleash a deadly cloud of radioactive material until technicians willing to sacrifice their lives — as the workers did at the original plant — plug the leaks.
A visit to the exclusion zone, more desolate than usual, found that the invasion risked a catastrophe worse than the original explosion and fire at Chernobyl that sent radioactive material into the atmosphere and became a symbol of the Soviet Union’s stumbling final years. Billions of dollars were spent by the international community, including Russia, to stabilize and secure the area.
Now authorities are working with Ukraine’s defense ministry on ways to protect Chernobyl’s most critical places. At the top of the list are anti-drone systems and anti-tank barriers, along with a system to protect against warplanes and helicopters.
The Russians, in typical Cossack fashion, stole everything that wasn’t nailed down.
Ukrainian authorities can’t monitor radiation levels across the zone because Russian soldiers stole the main server for the system, severing the connection on March 2. The International Atomic Energy Agency said Saturday it still wasn’t receiving remote data from its monitoring systems. The Russians even took Chernobyl staffers’ personal radiation monitors.
In the communications center, one of the buildings in the zone not overgrown by nature, the Russians looted and left a carpet of shattered glass. The building felt deeply of the 1980s, with a map on a wall still showing the Soviet Union. Someone at some point had taken a pink marker and traced Ukraine’s border.
Was this a crime of ignorance or malice? Was Russia trying to contaminate Ukraine? Or did they really not know any better?
The actions of some soldiers would suggest ignorance. Some soldiers even stole highly radioactive materials as souvenirs or possibly to sell.
It’s likely that hundreds or perhaps thousands of soldiers were exposed to enough radiation to make them sick — if not now, then sometime in the future. It demonstrates a frightening callousness by the military command that cares so little for the soldiers in their care.
