On the night of 26 April 1986, residents heard two explosions at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The reactor of unit four was completely destroyed, and a fire broke out on the roof. The remains of the reactor melted down, and a mixture of metal, sand, concrete, and fuel particles spread under the reactor site.
Firefighters were sent to put out the fire, not realising the consequences that night would have for their health. Children went to school in the morning, and their parents went to work. The residents of Pripyat, a town in the Kyiv region built in the immediate vicinity of Chernobyl for the workers there, were not informed about the extent of the disaster, which remains the largest in the history of civilian nuclear energy use.
A radioactive cloud travelled from the site of the accident across the territory of the Soviet Union (USSR), with Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine being the worst affected countries. However, Sweden, Finland, Austria, Norway, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Greece, Slovenia, and Italy also suffered the consequences.
In the coming days and weeks, 300,000 people were evacuated from the contaminated area around the reactor, though they were left in the dark about the exact circumstances of the accident. The residents of Pripyat assumed that the evacuation was temporary. When they boarded the buses, they took only the bare essentials with them, a thermos flask of tea and a bag of sandwiches. Pets were left behind in the expectation that they would soon be able to return.
The true extent of the tragedy was kept secret. Information about the largest man-made environmental disaster in the history of mankind was immediately classified as secret by the party and state leadership and the secret services of the USSR. Only when higher than usual radiation levels were detected in Sweden did the rest of the world learn about the Chernobyl reactor accident.
The Soviet secret service, the ‘Committee for State Security’ (KGB), played an important role in the initial cover-up. This was stated in one of the first reports from the KGB office in Kyiv, which was sent to the KGB of the USSR on 26 April:
‘Control of outgoing correspondence has been organised to prevent the leaking of information and the spreading of false and panicked rumours; access of subscribers to international communication lines has been limited.’
Instead of seeking clarity, many KGB staff rushed to identify so-called ‘panic-stricken speakers’. Daily ‘briefings’ were held with them, and twice a day the regional departments had to report such ‘alarmists’ to the management.
The fact that the wind blew a radioactive cloud over Kyiv did not stop the state leadership from sending the residents onto the streets for a crowded parade on one of the Soviet Union’s most ideologically important holidays. The head of the KGB reported to the Secretary of the Central Committee, Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, in the days following the accident that, despite everything, he had ensured adequate control of the 1 May celebrations.
My grandmother told me about those days, about how dark and dirty clouds swirled over her village near Lviv. My mother, like all the employees of the factory where she worked, was sent out onto the streets of Lviv on 1 May to wave red flags.
On the morning of 3 May 1986, 911 patients were admitted to hospital in Ukraine with symptoms of radiation exposure. The next day, 1,345, including 330 children. A few years later, my mother had to have a tumour in her thyroid gland removed. Was it because of Chernobyl? Hard to know. Many people who were exposed to nuclear radiation were later diagnosed with diseases such as thyroid cancer, leukaemia, and acute radiation sickness.
The Ukrainian and American historian Serhij Plohij has written extensively about this tragedy in the book ‘Chernobyl. History of the Nuclear Catastrophe’. Ukrainian author Kateryna Mikhalitsyna has written about the tragedy in ‘Flowers near the Fourth’ and ‘Reactors Do Not Explode. A Brief History of the Chernobyl Disaster’, which help the younger generation to understand the Chernobyl disaster.
36 years have passed since the reactor accident. Today, Chernobyl is once again a source of danger. On 24 February 2022, the first day of the large-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Russian occupiers seized the nuclear power plant and took the Chernobyl workers hostage. There were around 500 Russian soldiers and 50 units equipped with heavy weapons in the station.
According to Ukrainian Energy Minister Herman Galushchenko, the workers at the station were tortured. Only on 20 March 2022, almost a month later, was it possible to partially relieve the Chernobyl staff and evacuate people from the occupied territory. The workers were on duty for more than 600 hours and heroically fulfilled their professional duties to maintain an adequate level of safety.
Nevertheless, the risk of a new nuclear catastrophe was very high, as the Russian occupiers did not hesitate to fire on the stations. The Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant in the south of Ukraine was also fired upon with rockets. These landed near plant buildings, starting a large fire.
The Russian occupiers chose the so-called ‘Red Forest’, of all places, to dig trenches. It is a ten square kilometre coniferous forest that was exposed to the highest levels of radiation following the Chernobyl accident, with radiation levels still higher than normal. Without adequate knowledge on how to behave in contaminated areas, without personal protective equipment, and without observing the rules of radiation safety, the Russian occupiers also put themselves at risk.
According to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, several Russian soldiers exposed to significant doses of radiation during their stay in the Chernobyl exclusion zone were admitted to in the scientific and medical Centre for Radiation Medicine and Human Ecology in Gomel, Belarus.
The Russian state is not only lying to the rest of the world about the war in Ukraine, but its own soldiers are also being sent into radioactively contaminated areas unprotected and uninformed.
The events of the first weeks of the war made clear once again that the safety of nuclear facilities must be prioritised at all costs to prevent similar tragedies in the future.
