As a base of operations for an attack on the Ukrainian capital Kiev, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, one of the most toxic places on the planet, was probably not the best choice. But that doesn’t seem to have bothered the generals who took control of the site in the early stages of the war.
“We told them not to do it, it was dangerous, but they ignored us,” Valeri Simionov, chief security engineer at the Chernobyl nuclear site, said in an interview. Seemingly oblivious to the risks, Russian forces roamed the entire site with tanks and bulldozers, digging trenches and bunkers — and exposing themselves to potentially harmful doses of radiation still present beneath the surface.
On a visit to the recently liberated nuclear station — the scene of the world’s worst nuclear disaster in 1986 — the wind kicked up clouds of dust on the roads. Scenes of disregard for security were visible everywhere, although Ukrainian nuclear officials say the month-long Russian military occupation has not caused any major radiation leaks.
In just one location a few hundred meters outside the city of Chernobyl, the Russian Army has excavated a complex labyrinth of trenches and bunkers. An armored troop transport was parked beside it, abandoned. It seems the soldiers spent months camped out in the radioactive forest.
Although international nuclear safety experts say they have not confirmed any cases of radiation poisoning among soldiers, cancers and other potential health problems linked to radiation exposure may not present themselves until decades later.
Simionov said Russian forces included officials from a nuclear, biological and chemical unit, as well as experts from Rosatom, Russia’s state-owned nuclear energy company, who consulted with Ukrainian scientists.
But, he said, Russian nuclear experts appeared to exert little influence over army commanders. The military would be more concerned with planning the attack on Kiev and, after that failed, using Chernobyl as an escape route to Belarus for its weakened troops.
“They came and did as they pleased” in the area around the nuclear plant, Simionov said. Despite the efforts of him and other Ukrainian nuclear engineers and technicians who remained at the site throughout the occupation, working 24 hours a day and unable to leave except for a shift change in late March, trench excavation continued.
The trenches were not the only example of folly in handling a site so toxic that it still has the potential to spew radiation far beyond Ukraine’s borders.
In an especially reckless move, a Russian soldier from a chemical, biological and nuclear protection unit took a source of cobalt-60 from a waste storage site with his bare hands, without gloves, exposing himself to so much radiation in a few seconds that it exceeded the limits of a Geiger counter, Simionov said. According to him, it is not clear what happened to the soldier.
According to the engineer, the most worrying moment came in mid-March, when electricity was cut off in a cooling tank where spent nuclear fuel rods are stored, which contain many times more radioactive material than what was dispersed in the 1986 catastrophe.
This has led Ukrainians to fear a fire if the water cooling the fuel sticks boils until it evaporates, exposing the sticks to the air. But that possibility was quickly ruled out by experts. “They’re highlighting worst-case scenarios, which are possible but not necessarily plausible,” said Edwin Lyman, a nuclear reactor expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
For experts, the biggest risk of a prolonged power outage would be that the hydrogen generated by spent fuel would build up and explode. Bruno Chareyron, laboratory director at CRIIRAD, a French entity that monitors radiation risks, cited a 2008 study of the Chernobyl facility, suggesting that this could happen in about 15 days.
But electricity was eventually turned back on at the plant, allaying fears.
The march to Kiev along the west bank of the Dnipro River began and ended in Chernobyl for the Russian 31st and 36th Combined Arms Armies, which were accompanied by auxiliary special forces and ethnic Chechen fighters. The formation invaded Ukraine on February 24, fought in the Kiev suburbs for nearly a month and then retreated, leaving in its wake incinerated armored vehicles, their own war dead, widespread destruction and evidence of human rights violations, including hundreds of civilian bodies on the streets of the city of Bucha.
As they withdrew from Chernobyl, Russian troops detonated a bridge in the exclusion zone and planted a dense labyrinth of anti-personnel mines, triggers and booby traps around the decommissioned station. According to the Ukrainian government agency that runs the plant, two Ukrainian soldiers stepped on mines this past week.
In a bizarre end to the Russian unit’s misadventures, Ukrainian soldiers found abandoned home appliances on the streets in the Chernobyl area. They were reportedly looted from cities in the Ukrainian countryside and dropped, for unknown reasons, during the final retreat. Journalists found a washing machine on the side of the road outside Chernobyl.
Employees of the agency that manages the exclusion zone, residing in the city, suffered under Russian occupation, but nothing approaching the barbaric acts committed by Russian forces against civilians in Butcha and other cities near Kiev.
Natasha Siloshenko, 45, a cook in a cafeteria that caters to nuclear workers, said the Russians arrived in seemingly endless columns on the first day of the war. She had been watching warily on a side street. “It was a sea of ​​vehicles,” she said. “They came in waves, crossing the zone and advancing rapidly towards Kiev.”
There was little to no fighting in the area, as far as she could see. The armored columns just passed through there. During the occupation, Russian soldiers searched the apartments of nuclear technicians and engineers, firefighters and support workers residing in the city of Chernobyl. “They took valuables” from the apartments, she said, but there was little violence.
Officials tried to alert the Russians to the risks of radiation, but to no avail.
After 36 years, the background radiation in most of the 29 km exclusion zone around the nuclear power plant poses little risk and is roughly equivalent to the radiation from a high-altitude air flight. But in some unseen spots, some of which are an area of ​​an acre or two, others of just a few square meters, radiation can rise to thousands of times normal environmental levels.
According to Chareyron, the nuclear expert, a soldier in one of these dangerous locations would be exposed in just one hour to what experts consider a safe level of radiation for an entire year. The most dangerous isotopes present in soil are cesium-137, strontium-90 and various isotopes of plutonium. Days or weeks spent at these times carry a high risk of cancer, he said.
Throughout the zone, radioactive particles sank into the soil to a depth of up to 30 cm. They pose little risk if left below the surface, where their half-life would pass more or less harmlessly over decades or hundreds of years.
Until the Russian invasion, the biggest danger of this contamination was its absorption in mosses and trees that can burn in forest fires, spreading the poisonous substances in smoke, or through birds that consume radioactive insects that live in the land. “‘This is the exclusion zone, there are places you can’t go,'” officials told the Russians, according to Siloshenko. “They ignored us.”
