This text is predicated on interviews and analysis by the Reckoning Mission, a multinational group of journalists and researchers gathering proof of warfare crimes in Ukraine.
On the afternoon of February 24, 2022, two Russian military commanders, carrying black uniforms with no insignia, entered the workplace of Valentyn Heyko, the shift supervisor on the Chornobyl State Enterprise. In a room with a window overlooking the decommissioned reactor, Normal Sergey Burakov and Colonel Andrey Frolenkov advised Heyko that they’d taken management of the nuclear plant. Russia had invaded Ukraine solely that day, crossing the Belarusian border just some miles to the north.
Heyko advised the Russians that he was obligated, as an expert, to conduct a safety briefing with any customer to his facility, to be sure that they have been conscious of the quite a few well being hazards current on the web site of the worst nuclear catastrophe in historical past. To begin with, he advised them that they’d not taken management of a nuclear-power plant. What they’d captured, Heyko advised the invaders, was the extremely contaminated territory of a decommissioned facility that has not produced any electrical energy since its shutdown in 2000. That was the yr the Ukrainian authorities fashioned the Chornobyl State Enterprise to supervise the containment of the location’s environmental harms. (I’m utilizing the Ukrainian transliteration of Chornobyl, not the Russian, Chernobyl, on this article.)
Heyko, a nuclear engineer who had come to work at Chornobyl only a yr after the catastrophe, then started to itemize the protection precautions guests must comply with. These embrace radiation checkups upon getting into and exiting high-risk areas, a ban on consuming or ingesting outdoors designated areas, and quite a few different restrictions that the Russian commanders and the tons of of troops they’d simply dropped at the plant had zero probability of following throughout their army operation. Lastly, Heyko urged the Russians to strictly observe Ukrainian legislation with regard to radiation security with the intention to guarantee their well-being. Heyko had repeated this routine safety briefing, worded in nauseating bureaucratese, tons of of occasions.
The invaders, bowled over, instantly agreed to comply with Heyko’s guidelines, although doing so meant abiding by the legal guidelines of the nation that their army was making an attempt to annihilate. They defined that their mission was to guard a strategically vital facility that was now underneath their management; for the time being, Russian troops have been swiftly advancing towards the Ukrainian capital, which lay simply 100 miles to the south.
The Russians assured Heyko that their “particular army operation” would final just a few days, after which the Ukrainian military would lay down its arms in a lot the identical approach that the unit of the nationwide guard accountable for Chornobyl had executed. (The Ukrainians had truly adopted worldwide protocols that prohibit hostilities on the territory of nuclear services.) In a conciliatory tone, the Russians added that they’d captured the plant and not using a single shot fired. Heyko responded that he hoped they might quickly return house and not using a single shot fired as effectively.
Chornobyl, the Russians at this assembly appeared to imagine, could be however a short stopover on the glide path to Kyiv’s central sq., the place they might take pleasure in their victory parade. However the Russians’ five-week sojourn on the contaminated web site, the place they compelled a hostile native workers to proceed working at gunpoint, quickly turned one thing else fully. Chornobyl, not for the primary time, had turn out to be a strategic nightmare. Born of imperial vanity and self-deception, the botched occupation of the decommissioned nuclear plant foreshadowed Russia’s bigger failures in Ukraine.
The phrase earlier than the warfare typically means one thing totally different to individuals in Chornobyl than it does to these elsewhere in Ukraine. It’s spoken, usually, not in reference to the time earlier than 2022, and even 2014, when the Russian invasion of Ukraine actually started. Fairly, earlier than the warfare means “earlier than the 1986 nuclear catastrophe.” In a grim slip of the tongue, some veterans of that occasion name it nuclear warfare.
Final yr’s Russian occupation offered the Chornobyl State Enterprise personnel with new shared factors of reference. On March 9, at 11:22 a.m., the plant went into full-blackout mode due to the shelling of the electrical grid within the Kyiv area. If electrical energy weren’t rapidly restored, the workers wouldn’t be capable of monitor the developments contained in the ruins of reactor No. 4, the place a series response resulting in a nuclear explosion stays a chance; nor might they cool the disposed nuclear gasoline contained in Chornobyl’s storage facility.
A full blackout at a nuclear plant is a state of affairs that haunts scientists’ desires. Sarcastically, the deadly 1986 accident in Chornobyl occurred throughout a botched security take a look at aimed toward coping with precisely this: an emergency shutdown of the reactor in case of full blackout—the kind prompted, for instance, by a army assault. In 2022, Chornobyl relied on diesel mills for backup. These mills had sufficient gasoline to maintain the methods operating for 14 hours. What would occur after that was anybody’s guess.
Electricians and engineers on the Chornobyl Nuclear Energy Plant describe what occurred when Russian army motion disrupted its electrical energy provide in March 2022. (Video fragment from the documentary Chornobyl 22, courtesy of Oleksiy Radynski and the Reckoning Mission)
Heyko abruptly summoned the Russian commanders to his workplace. The Russian invasion of the Kyiv area was about to supply one other planetary-scale catastrophe, he advised them. To keep away from it, he wanted only one factor from the Russians: diesel gasoline. A number of it.
The commanders agreed. The duty of managing diesel-fuel provide fell to one of many plant’s engineers, Valeriy Semenov, the de facto head of safety on the occupied facility. In response to Heyko’s calculations, Chornobyl required about 30 tons of gasoline each day. For 3 nights, convoys of army gasoline vans carrying the required quantity of diesel arrived on the station. Quickly, the disgruntled Russian commanders confirmed up in Heyko’s workplace to inform him that his decommissioned nuclear plant had consumed half the gasoline supposed for his or her entrance line close to Kyiv.
The Russian commanders had each purpose to fret. By mid-March, Russia’s blitzkrieg plan was in tatters, its troops caught within the Kyiv suburbs of Bucha and Irpin, the place they confronted fierce native resistance. With overstretched provide routes susceptible to native sabotage, getting gasoline to Russian troops was a headache even earlier than the Chornobyl plant started consuming truckloads of diesel. The Russian commanders advised Heyko and Semenov that they’d a greater concept for fueling the nuclear plant.
On February 23, 2022—the day earlier than the Russian invasion—the Ukrainian authorities had disconnected the nation’s electrical grid for the primary time, in testing mode, from the facility grids of Belarus and Russia and linked it to these of the European Union as a substitute. When the invasion began, this testing mode turned the established order. However the bodily energy strains that had as soon as linked Ukraine to Belarus nonetheless existed; they only lay on Russian-controlled territory. Now the Russians reconnected Chornobyl to the Belarusian energy grid. The Ukrainian plant was on this sense yoked again to Russia—to not provide vitality to the empire, because it did in Soviet days, however to sap the sources from Moscow’s colonial warfare.
Vitaliy Popov, a 65-year-old engineer at Chornobyl, had a way of déjà vu. In Might 1986, he had been on trip together with his spouse and new child little one when he realized of the catastrophe on the nuclear plant. He volunteered to return to Chornobyl and assist comprise the injury. Now, in mid-March 2022, he realized that the Russians had eventually agreed to rotate out a few of the plant’s exhausted personnel. And once more he volunteered, this time to enter de facto captivity on the Russian-occupied catastrophe web site—so as, as he put it, “to not let 1986 occur once more.”
Along with dozens of his colleagues, Popov set out from Slavutych, the city the place most of Chornobyl’s personnel stay. Even attending to the plant was dangerous. The route handed by way of Russian-occupied components of northern Ukraine and a slender strip of Belarusian territory, the place all of the bridges crossing the Dnipro River had been blown up. The nuclear specialists traversed the river on leaky picket boats manned by native fishermen.
When Popov arrived on the plant, it teemed with Soviet-era army automobiles, simply because it had after the catastrophe in 1986. And simply as then, younger troopers overtly ignored all norms of radiation security. Males rested on the contaminated floor and consumed their rations within the open air, the place consuming considerably elevated the chance of radiation poisoning. However there was an important distinction. In 1986, Popov recalled, regardless of the Soviet military’s blunders, it was performing a activity to cease a meltdown that will have made a lot of Eurasia uninhabitable. What was the Russian military doing in Chornobyl now?
The 2022 occupation, three weeks outdated at this level, had the macabre air of a cyberpunk fantasy. The Russian commanders had largely ignored Valentyn Heyko’s safety briefing. They hadn’t even shared its content material with their fast subordinates—so Serhiy Dedyukhin, the physical-security engineer on the plant, understood when a high-ranking Russian officer requested him: “I see there’s a nuclear-waste-storage space on the plant. Is it true we’re not imagined to dig in there?”
The Russians introduced their very own dosimetrists to measure radiation on the Chornobyl grounds. On the idea of their alleged findings, the commanders proudly knowledgeable their troopers that the place was as secure as a vacationer resort. Among the occupiers even jokingly referred to Chornobyl as their “sanatorium,” a spot to relaxation between journeys to the entrance line close to Kyiv. Greater than that, Chornobyl had successfully turn out to be a nuclear protect—a location the place the Russians knew that the Ukrainian military wouldn’t bomb them.
As time glided by, the invaders’ temper darkened, and the ambiance grew tense. Serhiy Dedyukhin heard a Russian soldier who was manning a checkpoint say, as if to himself however loud sufficient for the engineer to listen to: “I’d slightly have all of those individuals right here gunned down.”
At first Dedyukhin froze. Then he approached the soldier with a query: “Would you your self slightly go house in a coffin made out of zinc or out of lead?”
The soldier was briefly puzzled. Then he will need to have understood: Lead coffins are meant for extremely radioactive our bodies. Dedyukhin was reminding him that Chornobyl’s workers, uniquely skilled to comprise the location’s lethal potential, held a horrible protect of their very own.
Partwork of the border between Ukraine and Belarus lies throughout the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, a 1,000-square-mile space, surrounded by barbed wire and armed forces checkpoints, so contaminated with the fallout from the 1986 catastrophe that it has been deemed unsuitable for all times. A international invasion by way of this radioactive territory as soon as appeared unthinkable. However when Russian army convoys crossed into Ukraine on February 24, 2022, rushing towards Kyiv, they blew previous the Dytiatky checkpoint, the entry to the exclusion zone, the place guests usually needed to be inspected for radioactive particles. The Russians turned Dytiatky into a traditional army checkpoint—and inadvertently carried radioactive mud together with them towards Kyiv, successfully increasing the invisible borders of the exclusion zone to all of the territory they occupied.
The exclusion zone has developed over the a long time into a fancy ecosystem by which uncommon species of animals, birds, and crops have flourished with little human interference. However people additionally stay within the zone, fairly a number of of whom don’t have anything to do with the Chornobyl plant or the nuclear trade. In contrast to the close by metropolis of Pripyat, which was utterly deserted in 1986, the traditional city of Chornobyl is a completely functioning city settlement the place ecological, emergency, and administrative employees toil in shifts. The city additionally has a number of hundred everlasting residents generally known as “self-settlers,” most of them locals who insisted on returning to their houses after the 1986 catastrophe made them ostensibly uninhabitable. Within the early hours of the invasion, a lot of the shift employees evacuated the city. However for the self-settlers, the Russian invasion appeared like a bogus purpose to agree to 1 extra exile from their land.
On the day of the invasion, 84-year-old Yevhen Markevych famous in his diary: “A sorrow has come. They’re capturing. Putin is like Hitler.” He was 4 years outdated when the Nazis invaded Ukraine, and he nonetheless remembered seeing his Jewish neighbors taken away to be executed. Now Russians have been prowling the streets of his hometown, in search of Ukrainian partisans and saboteurs. Markevych, who for years had labored as a dosimetrist, had a short dialog with the troopers and concluded that they’d no concept about radiation and its risks. He wrote in his diary: “Poor lads. They don’t know the place they’re or what they’re doing right here.”
One other Chornobyl resident, Mykhailo Shylan, is a former schoolteacher and native historical past fanatic who has organized a museum in his entrance yard. He shows war-related objects he has discovered within the woods surrounding Chornobyl, which have been the location of fierce combating in each world wars and yield relics relationship again no less than a century. His museum contains stays of World Battle I munitions, Nazi artifacts, and Soviet-era propaganda gadgets. In 2022, Russian troopers squatted in Shylan’s guesthouse for a number of days. After they left, the museum custodian added some brand-new, however already historic, gadgets to his assortment. Amongst them, he most proudly shows a sardine can that options the brand of the Russian military and an inscription: Russian fish world.
The Chornobyl exclusion zone was house to a hostile native inhabitants desperate to undermine the Russian occupation. However the invaders searched in useless for armed saboteurs. The partisan motion that thrived on this postapocalyptic panorama was digital: Locals used their cellphones to clandestinely movie the actions of Russian army convoys and switch the recordings to their contacts within the Ukrainian armed forces. On the plant itself, cell and web service had been severed, however outdated landlines nonetheless labored. Oleksandr Kalishuk, an engineer on the plant, referred to as his contacts in Slavutych to go on info for the Ukrainian army. Each time he hung up, Kalishuk anticipated the Russians to return after him, however they by no means did.
By the tip of March, the plant personnel turned satisfied that the Russians have been getting ready for battle on the catastrophe web site. The troopers constructed barricades out of sandbags they full of radioactive sand they’d dug from proper across the plant. Firing factors have been erected on high of the plant’s buildings. A number of outdated, dysfunctional army automobiles appeared on the plant’s territory, apparently for use as dummies at army checkpoints. The workers instantly acknowledged these automobiles: They have been those used to eradicate the fallout of the 1986 catastrophe, and since then had been put in in an open-air museum on the town. The automobiles have been so extremely contaminated that museum guests weren’t allowed inside a dozen meters of them. Now they have been sitting in the course of the nuclear plant, with uninformed troopers manning checkpoints proper subsequent to them.
Quickly rumors reached the workers that the Russians have been digging trenches within the Pink Forest, essentially the most contaminated a part of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. This woodland, adjoining to the plant, had suffered such heavy radioactive fallout in the summertime of 1986 that its pine timber turned purple. The poisoned timber have been minimize down and buried underneath the very floor the place the Russians now began to dig.
Native radiation consultants focus on contamination ranges within the Pink Forest after the Russian takeover of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. (Video fragment from the documentary Chornobyl 22, courtesy of Oleksiy Radynski and the Reckoning Mission)
How was this even attainable? Valentyn Heyko had an inkling after talking with Andrey Frolenkov, one of many Russian commanders. The takeover of the Chornobyl plant had gone so easily, Frolenkov boasted, as a result of the power had an similar twin in Russia. The Russian army had apparently used this doppelgänger, the Kursk Nuclear Energy Station, to plan and rehearse the Chornobyl takeover—together with the siting of defensive trenches across the plant.
The Kursk nuclear station is certainly much like Chornobyl in each respect however one: Its territory is just not radioactively contaminated.
By late March, Russian forces have been dealing with a rout within the Kyiv area, and the troops in Chornobyl started looting the realm for something of worth they may take house. They didn’t hassle to test the radiation ranges of their bounty. What they couldn’t carry away, they destroyed. Upon their departure, they took with them 169 troopers of the Ukrainian nationwide guard whom they’d seized as prisoners in the course of the occupation. 100 and eight are nonetheless in captivity on the time of writing.
Russia has not made public the destiny of the troopers it stationed at Chornobyl. Liudmyla Kozak, a bodily safety engineer on the plant, says that she noticed Russian troopers on a bus certain for Belarus vomiting, and sources in Belarus advised CNN that some Russian troops have been handled for radiation illness at a particular analysis heart there.
Russian troopers retreating from the Chornobyl nuclear plant took radioactive souvenirs with them, two of the plant’s engineers recount. (Video fragment from the documentary Chornobyl 22, courtesy of Oleksiy Radynski and the Reckoning Mission)
Russia’s defeat within the battle for Kyiv was not simply the results of poor army planning. The invaders failed to grasp the nation they’d entered, with its manifold variations from Russia. Lots of these variations are themselves the results of the colonial exploitation of Ukraine—a rustic the place a novel group of pros tended the lands polluted by the poisonous legacies of previous empires.
Within the Russian imperial mindset, Ukraine equals Russia simply because the Kursk nuclear-power plant equals the one in Chornobyl. The 2 assumptions are equally mistaken. The Russians needed to be taught this the arduous approach.
*Lead picture: Illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: Dimitar Dilkoff / AFP / Getty; STF / AFP/ Getty; Library of Congress; Oleksiy Radynski / The Reckoning Mission.
