As a place to attack the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, one of the most toxic places on earth, was probably not the best choice. But that doesn’t seem to bother Russian generals who took over the site in the early stages of the war.
“We told them not to do it, that it is dangerous, but they ignored us,” said in an interview Valery Simyonov, chief safety engineer at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
Apparently unperturbed by security concerns, Russian forces crowded the area with bulldozers and tanks, dug trenches and bunkers – and were exposed to potentially harmful doses of radiation retained below the surface.
Visiting the recently liberated nuclear power plant, the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident in 1986, the wind blew swirls of dust on the roads and scenes of disregard for safety were everywhere, although Ukrainian nuclear officials say no major leakage of radiation from Russia’s Monthly Military Occupation.
In just one place with vast trenches a few hundred yards outside the city of Chernobyl, the Russian army had dug a complex maze of sunken paths and bunkers. An abandoned armored personnel carrier was sitting nearby.
The soldiers were apparently camping for weeks in the radioactive forest. While international nuclear safety experts say they have not confirmed a single case of radiation sickness among soldiers, cancer and other potential health problems related to radiation exposure may not develop until decades later.
Mr Simyonov said the Russian military had sent officers from the nuclear, biological and chemical units, as well as experts from Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear energy company, to consult with Ukrainian scientists.
But Russian nuclear experts do not appear to have much power over army commanders, he said. The military seemed more preoccupied with planning the attack on Kyiv and then failed, using Chernobyl as an escape route to Belarus for its heavily crushed troops.
“They came and did what they wanted” in the area around the station, said Mr. Simyonov. Despite the efforts of him and other Ukrainian nuclear engineers and technicians who remained at the site during the occupation, working around the clock and unable to leave except for one shift at the end of March, reinforcements continued.
Earthworks were not the only case of recklessness in treating an object so toxic that it still has the potential to spread radiation far beyond Ukraine’s borders.
In a particularly unintentional operation, a Russian soldier from the Chemical, Biological and Nuclear Defense Department lifted a cobalt-60 source from a bare-storage waste disposal site, exposing himself to so much radiation for a few seconds that he stepped off the scales of a Geiger counter. , said Mr. Simyonov. It is unclear what happened to the man, he said.
The most worrying moment, Mr Simyonov said, occurred in mid-March, when electricity was cut off in a cooling pool that stores spent nuclear fuel rods, which contain many times more radioactive material than was dispersed in the 1986 crash. This raised fears among Ukrainians of a fire if the water cooling the fuel rods evaporated, exposing them to air, although this prospect was quickly rejected by experts.
As they withdrew from Chernobyl, Russian troops blew up a bridge in the exclusion zone and planted a dense maze of antipersonnel mines, wires and mine traps around the station. Two Ukrainian soldiers have stepped on mines in the past week, according to the Ukrainian government agency that manages the site.
A strange last sign of the accidents of the unit Ukrainian soldiers found discarded devices and electronic goods on the roads in the Chernobyl zone. They were apparently looted from cities deeper in Ukraine and dumped for unknown reasons during the last retreat. Reporters found a laundromat on the side of the road just outside Chernobyl.
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