This text relies on interviews and analysis by the Reckoning Challenge, a multinational group of journalists and researchers amassing 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, Basic Sergey Burakov and Colonel Andrey Frolenkov instructed Heyko that that they had taken management of the nuclear plant. Russia had invaded Ukraine solely that day, crossing the Belarusian border just some miles to the north.
Heyko instructed the Russians that he was obligated, as knowledgeable, to conduct a safety briefing with any customer to his facility, to be sure that they had been conscious of the quite a few well being hazards current on the website of the worst nuclear catastrophe in historical past. To begin with, he instructed them that that they had not taken management of a nuclear-power plant. What that they had captured, Heyko instructed 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 shaped the Chornobyl State Enterprise to supervise the containment of the positioning’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 security precautions guests need to comply with. These embrace radiation checkups upon coming into and exiting high-risk areas, a ban on consuming or consuming outdoors designated areas, and quite a few different restrictions that the Russian commanders and the tons of of troops that they had simply delivered to the plant had zero probability of following throughout their navy operation. Lastly, Heyko urged the Russians to strictly observe Ukrainian legislation with regard to radiation security with a view to guarantee their well-being. Heyko had repeated this routine safety briefing, worded in nauseating bureaucratese, tons of of occasions.
The invaders, shocked, instantly agreed to comply with Heyko’s guidelines, although doing so meant abiding by the legal guidelines of the nation that their navy was making an attempt to annihilate. They defined that their mission was to guard a strategically necessary facility that was now underneath their management; in the intervening time, Russian troops had been swiftly advancing towards the Ukrainian capital, which lay simply 100 miles to the south.
The Russians assured Heyko that their “particular navy operation” would final only some days, after which the Ukrainian military would lay down its arms in a lot the identical manner that the unit of the nationwide guard in control of Chornobyl had finished. (The Ukrainians had really adopted worldwide protocols that prohibit hostilities on the territory of nuclear amenities.) In a conciliatory tone, the Russians added that that they had captured the plant with out a single shot fired. Heyko responded that he hoped they might quickly return dwelling with out a single shot fired as properly.
Chornobyl, the Russians at this assembly appeared to imagine, can be however a quick 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 website, the place they pressured a hostile native workers to proceed working at gunpoint, quickly grew to become one thing else completely. Chornobyl, not for the primary time, had turn into 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 folks 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. Quite, 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 to monitor the developments contained in the ruins of reactor No. 4, the place a series response resulting in a nuclear explosion stays a risk; 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. Satirically, the deadly 1986 accident in Chornobyl occurred throughout a botched security take a look at geared toward coping with precisely this: an emergency shutdown of the reactor in case of full blackout—the type triggered, for instance, by a navy assault. In 2022, Chornobyl relied on diesel turbines for backup. These turbines had sufficient gasoline to maintain the programs working 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 navy motion disrupted its electrical energy provide in March 2022. (Video fragment from the documentary Chornobyl 22, courtesy of Oleksiy Radynski and the Reckoning Challenge)
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 instructed them. To keep away from it, he wanted only one factor from the Russians: diesel gasoline. A lot 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 day-after-day. For 3 nights, convoys of navy 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 instructed Heyko and Semenov that that they had a greater thought 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 grew to become the established order. However the bodily energy strains that had as soon as linked Ukraine to Belarus nonetheless existed; they simply 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 assets from Moscow’s colonial warfare.
Vitaliy Popov, a 65-year-old engineer at Chornobyl, had a way of déjà vu. In Could 1986, he had been on trip together with his spouse and new child youngster when he discovered of the catastrophe on the nuclear plant. He volunteered to return to Chornobyl and assist comprise the injury. Now, in mid-March 2022, he discovered that the Russians had eventually agreed to rotate out among the plant’s exhausted personnel. And once more he volunteered, this time to enter de facto captivity on the Russian-occupied catastrophe website—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 reside. Even attending to the plant was dangerous. The route handed via Russian-occupied elements 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 navy autos, simply because it had after the catastrophe in 1986. And simply as then, younger troopers brazenly 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 danger of radiation poisoning. However there was a vital 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 instant 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 presupposed 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 protected 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 into 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 relatively have all of those folks right here gunned down.”
At first Dedyukhin froze. Then he approached the soldier with a query: “Would you your self relatively go dwelling in a coffin made out of zinc or out of lead?”
The soldier was briefly puzzled. Then he should have understood: Lead coffins are meant for extremely radioactive our bodies. Dedyukhin was reminding him that Chornobyl’s workers, uniquely educated to comprise the positioning’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 military checkpoints, so contaminated with the fallout from the 1986 catastrophe that it has been deemed unsuitable for all times. A international invasion via this radioactive territory as soon as appeared unthinkable. However when Russian navy convoys crossed into Ukraine on February 24, 2022, dashing 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 navy 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 advanced over the a long time into a posh ecosystem during which uncommon species of animals, birds, and vegetation have flourished with little human interference. However people additionally reside within the zone, fairly a couple of of whom don’t have anything to do with the Chornobyl plant or the nuclear business. In contrast to the close by metropolis of Pripyat, which was utterly deserted in 1986, the traditional city of Chornobyl is a totally functioning city settlement the place ecological, emergency, and administrative employees toil in shifts. The city additionally has a number of hundred everlasting residents often known as “self-settlers,” most of them locals who insisted on returning to their properties after the 1986 catastrophe made them ostensibly uninhabitable. Within the early hours of the invasion, many 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 had been prowling the streets of his hometown, searching for Ukrainian partisans and saboteurs. Markevych, who for years had labored as a dosimetrist, had a quick dialog with the troopers and concluded that that they had no thought 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 had been the positioning of fierce preventing in each world wars and yield relics relationship again no less than a century. His museum contains stays of World Struggle I munitions, Nazi artifacts, and Soviet-era propaganda objects. 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, objects to his assortment. Amongst them, he most proudly shows a sardine can that options the emblem of the Russian military and an inscription: Russian fish world.
The Chornobyl exclusion zone was dwelling 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 navy 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 data for the Ukrainian navy. Each time he hung up, Kalishuk anticipated the Russians to come back after him, however they by no means did.
By the top of March, the plant personnel grew to become satisfied that the Russians had been making ready for battle on the catastrophe website. The troopers constructed barricades out of sandbags they crammed with radioactive sand they’d dug from proper across the plant. Firing factors had been erected on high of the plant’s buildings. A number of outdated, dysfunctional navy autos appeared on the plant’s territory, apparently for use as dummies at navy checkpoints. The workers instantly acknowledged these autos: They had 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 autos had been so extremely contaminated that museum guests weren’t allowed inside a dozen meters of them. Now they had been sitting in the midst of the nuclear plant, with uninformed troopers manning checkpoints proper subsequent to them.
Quickly rumors reached the workers that the Russians had been digging trenches within the Crimson 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 crimson. The poisoned timber had been minimize down and buried underneath the very floor the place the Russians now began to dig.
Native radiation specialists talk about contamination ranges within the Crimson Forest after the Russian takeover of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. (Video fragment from the documentary Chornobyl 22, courtesy of Oleksiy Radynski and the Reckoning Challenge)
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 ability had an similar twin in Russia. The Russian navy 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 shouldn’t be radioactively contaminated.
By late March, Russian forces had been dealing with a rout within the Kyiv area, and the troops in Chornobyl started looting the world for something of worth they may take dwelling. 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 sure for Belarus vomiting, and sources in Belarus instructed CNN that some Russian troops had been handled for radiation illness at a particular analysis middle 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 Challenge)
Russia’s defeat within the battle for Kyiv was not simply the results of poor navy planning. The invaders failed to know the nation they’d entered, with its manifold variations from Russia. A lot of these variations are themselves the results of the colonial exploitation of Ukraine—a rustic the place a singular 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 improper. The Russians needed to study this the onerous manner.
*Lead picture: Illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: Dimitar Dilkoff / AFP / Getty; STF / AFP/ Getty; Library of Congress; Oleksiy Radynski / The Reckoning Challenge.
