‘People live here’: Neither nuclear disaster nor the Russian invasion has managed to destroy Chernobyl

In Chernobyl, tragedy takes the trouble to give warning. It does so by telephone at 4 a.m. At that hour, the doorbell rang at Alexander Zelentsov’s house on April 26, 1986. His shift at the nuclear power plant didn’t start until four hours later, at 8 a.m., but there was a fire in one of the reactors. Nothing serious, they told him. A car is already on its way to pick you up.

Sergei Kirikiev was woken up by his cell phone. On February 24, 2022, at the same time, he was told that Russian troops were crossing the border from Belarus. “That’s impossible,” he replied.

It wasn’t.

A convoy of 80 soldiers entered the Chernobyl exclusion zone. “They arrived firing. Into the air or at the facades of houses. Random shots.” Days later, on one of those facades, graffiti appeared in Russian that, probably unintentionally, encapsulates one of the reasons for this war: “Who gave you permission to live better than us?”

***

Sergei Kirikiev recalls that phone call, stroking his mustache, the same silver color as his hair. He heads Ecocentre, the institution responsible for monitoring radioactive contamination in the exclusion zone. Forty years ago, after the explosion of reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, Ukraine — then part of the Soviet Union — evacuated a 30-kilometer (18.5-mile) radius that has remained isolated ever since. Only workers responsible for plant maintenance and environmental control are authorized to enter. And they can do so only in shifts of up to 15 days. After that time, they are required to return home for the same number of days.

“This is a small, separate world, abandoned, isolated, without normal life, where we workers try to form a community,” says Kirikiev from the office he left on February 24, 2022, for Kyiv. “Nobody believed it. How could Russia invade us? How could they enter precisely through here, a restricted area full of radiation?”

Most of the workers, like Kirikiev, managed to escape, but about 180 weren’t warned in time. Liybov Zaradenko, a lab technician at Ecocentre, was one of them. She secretly called Sergei on the phone, but it was too late. “We were trapped, like in a ghetto.”

The Russian military’s objective was to reach Kyiv, but they established a logistics center in Chernobyl while the capital resisted. They encountered no resistance because the Ukrainian army, as the government would later explain, refused to engage in combat in such a sensitive area. Thus, Russian forces occupied the region and remained there for 36 days.

Ivan is a pseudonym for one of the workers who stayed behind. He prefers anonymity because he led the resistance network during the occupation. “My grandparents always told me about the Nazi occupation. I listened, but I never understood until I experienced it firsthand,” he says. “The Russian soldiers wouldn’t let us leave our homes. If we did, we had to wear a white handkerchief tied to our arm.” Ivan was held at gunpoint seven times, lying on the ground with a military boot on his back. “‘Who are you? What are you doing outside?’ they always asked me. And I always played dumb. Literally. I pretended to be stupid.” Ivan walked with a limp and mumbled simple phrases when the Russians harassed him. Behind the persona, and alongside six other workers, Ivan established a network to collect food and distribute it among those confined to their homes. He also shared military information, though he avoids talking about it. “We secretly baked bread and cooked,” he explains. On one of those occasions, Russian soldiers surprised them. “Who authorized this?” one of them asked. “Who forbade it?” Ivan replied.

“At night they wouldn’t let us turn on the heaters, so we opened the ovens to keep warm,” Liybov recounts. “They didn’t care if we had food. Some people had to go to the river for water. This river has nuclear contamination, but we had no other choice.” Liybov remembers three ethnically distinct units: one of Slavic Russians, another of Chechens, and another of Buryats, a Mongol people from Siberia. “The Slavs told us, ‘We won’t do anything to you, but if you aren’t loyal, we can’t vouch for the Chechens.’”

Dr. Volodymyr Vdovychenko was another leader of the Chernobyl ghetto resistance. He has spent 30 of his 62 years working as a general practitioner in the exclusion zone. He, too, goes in and out in shifts to avoid exceeding his radiation dose. “They looted everything. They broke into the Ecocentre, into the workers’ homes, and took everything, from computers to toasters,” he recalls in his office, filled with papers, books, and prescriptions. “They were poorly uniformed, some even wearing tracksuits. One of them told me he didn’t know why they were here, that they had been doing maneuvers in Belarus and were ordered to come in.” A medal of honor from the Ukrainian government is also visible in his office. He doesn’t want to reveal it, but it was awarded to him for hiding hundreds of documents that proved the military or police backgrounds of some of the trapped workers. Instead of making a list, he hid a list. And in doing so, he risked his life. If the Russians had discovered them, they probably would have been executed.

“They kept saying they were looking for Nazis. They called us Nazis,” Liybov recounts. “One day I was secretly using my cell phone and a soldier caught me, so I threw the phone into some bushes. He asked me what I was doing. I started crying and he said, ‘It doesn’t matter, we’re leaving in three days anyway.’”

On March 31, the troops withdrew from Chernobyl after the Russian army failed to capture Kyiv. The following day, Ukraine sent its units. Four years later, they are still there.

***

As he had been warned, a car picked up Alexander Zelentsov at his home, the man who received the call alerting him about a fire that was “not serious.”

“Every day, when I drove through the forest to the power plant, the reactor would appear on the horizon, peeking through the trees. That night I didn’t see it. There was no reactor. The beautiful reactor was gone.” There’s almost a touch of nostalgia in his tone. Much more so in his eyes.

Zelentsov speaks at the headquarters of the Association of Liquidators in Kyiv, a group that brings together the survivors of the cleanup and decontamination efforts that took place over three years after the reactor explosion. He is 75 years old and, as far as he knows, has no health problems. This is remarkable: Zelentsov was one of the first three people to enter the plant after the explosion. “We went in through the pipes. Two colleagues and I put on suits and gas masks and waded in, waist-deep in water.” At that time, the reactor core was exposed, the water was contaminated, and there were constant electrical discharges. “We had to manually cut the connection to reactor 3. If we didn’t, it would explode.” Zelentsov managed to do it along with his two colleagues, who would later die from radiation poisoning. They prevented a detonation that would have raised the tragedy to unimaginable levels. “It’s possible that if number 3 had exploded, it would have triggered a chain reaction that would have led to the explosion of numbers 1 and 2. That would have forced the evacuation of Europe. It would still be uninhabitable today,” he says, as if recounting an anecdote. Beside him, Eugene Yonushkievich, 79, then chief operator of the control room, sums up Zelentsov’s actions. “He saved Europe. This guy sitting here saved Europe.”

Vasily Davydenko was the fire chief and arrived at the plant at the same time as Eugene and Alexander, with whom he shared a table and conversation. “I climbed onto the roof to look at the reactor and see what the situation was. We immediately realized there was no reactor. If you looked over, you would die.” Davydenko remembers seeing pieces of graphite that had been part of the reactor’s interior on the plant’s roof. It emitted so much radiation that it glowed. “A colleague touched a piece, and within minutes his hand was completely destroyed; it was falling off in pieces,” he recalls. “It felt like being in a sauna with a very strong smell of asphalt.”

About 80 workers entered the plant that night. Most were looking for Valery Khodemchuk, a nuclear engineer and the first victim of the catastrophe. He was near the reactor when it exploded.

He was Zelentsov’s best friend.

“I went in four times.” Before the last time, he ran into Yonushkievich. “He looked terrible, his face was bright red,” he recalls. “But he begged me to let him in one more time.” During that last incursion, in which Zelentsov managed to get to the other side of a wall separating him from the reactor core, he emerged vomiting and fainted. Yonushkievich carried him out on his shoulders. He was taken to a Moscow hospital, where most of the workers who had entered the plant that night began arriving. “All my hair fell out, chunks of skin. One of my colleagues literally lost his buttocks,” Zelentsov remembers. “But I survived.”

Many of the 80 people who entered the Soviet-era building that night 40 years ago to save Europe did not leave. Official figures from the Soviet era report 31 deaths. The most reliable estimates from the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) estimate 4,000 deaths in the following years.

Valery Khodemchuk’s body was never found. His widow, Natalia Khodemchuk, died last November after a Russian drone crashed into her apartment on the 16th floor of a building in Kyiv. She suffered burns over 45% of her body and died in the hospital. Aleksandr Zelentsov was with her until the very end.

***

“I am proud to be from Chernobyl. And I always will be.” Galina Voloshina’s grandparents were born in the town of Chernobyl, a historic enclave dating back to 1193 where Christians and Jews lived side by side. “My great-grandparents were from here too.” And, in fact, all her relatives as far as she knows.

“I never left. When they evacuated in 1986, I hid with my family, and a few days later we started working as liquidators. My husband died, but I’m still here.” Galina Voloshina is 77 years old, tall, with short platinum blonde hair. She is what in Ukraine is known as a samosely, something like a settler, a resident of the newly created exclusion zone who refused to leave and be relocated to apartments in Kyiv or Moscow. Officially, it is forbidden to live in the restricted area, but the Ukrainian government turns a blind eye to exceptions, as long as the person is not a minor.

There are hardly any samoselys left. There isn’t even an official count. About 12 women, according to estimates from those who know the place. As far as anyone knows, all widows.

Galina Voloshina lives on the outskirts of Chernobyl. A straight stretch of road that was once a street is now a dirt track flanked by half-ruined houses, swallowed by trees. At the end, a dazzlingly well-kept house appears, radiating life, with graffiti above its entrance: “People live here.”

Before the catastrophe, Galina was the director of the Chernobyl daycare center. “This used to be a holiday village; people came to spend a few days, to swim in the river, to fish. It was a very pleasant town,” she says in the living room of her charming house, a small miracle of dignity surrounded by abandonment and oblivion. “It makes me very sad that my town is now known worldwide for this. That it has become this…” Several photographs adorn the wall of her living room. In one of them, a young Galina is seen having a picnic with her husband and some friends on a green meadow, the river in the background, and a clear blue sky that makes the memory of what Chernobyl once was — not so long ago, really — seem unreal.

Since the Russian invasion, the abandonment of the exclusion zone has been accompanied by militarization. Aside from the battlefronts, the Chernobyl area has the largest Ukrainian troop presence in the country. Checkpoints, fortifications, watchtowers, and barbed wire are everywhere. The effect is intimidating, especially at night, when air raid sirens pierce the dark and silent isolation.

“Before the Russian invasion, many tourists came. They took tours. Honestly, I can’t understand how anyone could prefer coming here to going to the Prado Museum,” says Volodymyr Verbitskyi, an official guide for the area, a former nuclear power plant worker, and a volunteer in a combat unit tasked with preventing the Russian army from returning to the area. “Today, nobody comes. In fact, you’re the first people to come here since the war began.” A dilapidated bus in a ditch, with a sign reading Chernobyl Tours, perfectly illustrates Verbitskyi’s point.

The exclusion zone — located in the north of the country, a two-hour drive from Kyiv — is accessed after passing through a checkpoint that separates life from emptiness. It’s like stepping through a looking glass into another reality: from traffic, houses, and people, you pass into exile and silence.

After passing through the checkpoint, you proceed along a road flanked by abandoned houses that leads to the town of Chernobyl. The town’s image is ghostly, metallic, and leaden. It’s a scene from a dystopia, an industrial landscape frozen in time. Most of the houses, gray and bleak, are in ruins, being swallowed by vegetation. Those that remain are spectral apartment blocks where workers live after completing their 15-day shifts. There are dirty windows and clothes hanging out to dry. Inside, the furniture, beds, curtains, and sheets of the apartments seem to form a small museum of Soviet nostalgia. The town’s pipes are exposed: the contaminated soil cannot be disturbed. Many of them are encased in aluminum insulation. There are two small grocery stores, packs of stray dogs patrolling the streets, and a dilapidated and broken fire station. At night, everything is dark. Deeply dark.

From there, Volodymyr Verbitskyi, our guide, leads us along a road that cuts through the Red Forest toward the nuclear power plant — the same forest that Aleksandr Zelentsov, the liquidator, crossed every day to see the reactor emerge from the trees. This stretch — so named because the cesium and plutonium particles stained the pine trees red — has the highest levels of radioactive contamination outside the plant. The dosimeter beeps wildly, and the small device’s screen reads 22 microsieverts per hour, radiation about 200 times higher than normal, though still lower than what a person receives on a long flight or during an X-ray. “The problem is in the soil and the metals, where radioactive particles accumulate that must be avoided when touched or inhaled,” Verbitskyi explains. That’s why no one in Ukraine understands why Russian soldiers dug trenches in this forest during the occupation. “I foresee a tough future for those kids,” Verbitskyi says.

Instead of the “beautiful reactor” that Alexander Zelentsov glimpsed every morning, the trees part today to reveal a colossal, gleaming metallic dome. This is the new sarcophagus, an imposing steel structure in the shape of an arch that rises 108 meters and covers the ill-fated reactor number 4. Installed in 2016, it cost €1.5 billion ($1.76 billion), contributed by more than 40 donor countries, and prevents radiation from spreading. “We’re going in there,” Verbitskyi says defiantly.

A five-person team awaits us at the entrance to the plant. It has been inactive since the accident, but until the decommissioning plan — currently interrupted by the war — is completed, it requires monitoring and maintenance. “The most complex task will be removing and storing the more than 200 tons of nuclear fuel from the three remaining reactors. It is one of the biggest challenges facing Europe,” explains Oleksander Hrihorash, head of Civil Protection at the plant and, from this point on, our guide through the facility.

After a body scan that measures our internal contamination level (to compare it with our level at the end of the visit), we enter changing rooms where we must undress and put on a white suit, mask, gloves, and helmet. A dosimeter is placed on our lapel, and we are led down an extremely long corridor straight out of a suspense film, with gold-plated walls, posters, and telephones frozen in 1986. “The workers ran through here after the explosion, to see what had happened,” says Zelentsov.

The end of the path leads us to the control room of the now-defunct reactor 4. It’s like a set from an old movie trying to simulate the future: hundreds of colored buttons, toy-like needle gauges, lights, and levers. Everything is rusted and aged by radiation. Zelentsov points out with chilling precision the AZ-5 button, used to shut down the reactor, which shift supervisor Aleksandr Akimov pressed at 1:23:40 a.m. on April 26, 1986. Four seconds later, the reactor exploded.

To explain the fateful event, Zelentsov references the well-known television series Chernobyl, which recreates the incident. “It was actually less dramatic,” he says. “They were carrying out a safety test that had already been performed four times at other plants, and they completed it successfully. At the end, they pressed the button to shut down the reactor, and it exploded. I understand that it doesn’t make for a dramatic scene, but that’s what happened. The operators were never aware that there was an imminent problem, and when it happened, they didn’t understand what had occurred.” Only months later was it discovered that the shutdown triggered by the button culminated a previous reaction caused by the test, which had pushed the reactor to its limits due to its design. A design that was abandoned after the accident.

We left the room and, after several more radiation checks on our hands and the soles of our shoes, we reached the entrance to the sarcophagus. It stood imposingly, seemingly vibrating, as if it were gestating something titanic within. “We’ll only be inside for a few minutes. Don’t touch anything; if you drop something, leave it there,” Zelentsov warned.

Deep within what was once reactor 4 lies the old Soviet-era concrete sarcophagus, built months after the accident. Inside, just a few meters away, separated only by that concrete wall, is what’s known as the Elephant’s Foot, a kind of dormant, isolated nuclear lava capable of irradiating all of Europe with radioactive contamination. The very core. An electrical panel indicates the radiation levels: while there were 22 microsieverts per hour in the Red Forest, here there are 685,000. Just a few hours in this place would pose a serious health risk.

Ten days before the Russian army entered the site, a drone, ostensibly intended for the power plant’s electrical substation, veered off course and crashed into the new sarcophagus. It was April 14, 2022, and it created a massive hole that caused Europe’s breath to hold for days. “If it had exploded inside, you and I wouldn’t be here talking,” Zelentsov summarizes.

Five minutes later, we left the sarcophagus.

***

Pripyat is the undeniable symbol of the catastrophe, the clearest mark of neglect. Before the accident, it was the largest and most important city in what is now the exclusion zone. It was born and grew alongside the power plant, developing to a population of over 50,000, almost all of them workers at a plant visible from any high window in the town. In just a few days, Pripyat went from city to emblem.

Verbitskyi, our guide, leads us through its streets. He was born and raised here. He married, had a son, built his career at the nuclear power plant, and at 25, like the rest of his neighbors and friends, he was evacuated in a convoy of buses. On April 28, 1986, Pripyat became a photograph, a static scene. Frozen as if under a spell, the city emptied in a matter of hours, leaving only the lifeless, everyday scene: furniture, clothes hanging out to dry, toys, traffic signs, a Ferris wheel about to be inaugurated, a swimming pool filled with still water. Forty years later, no one has lived here again. The city has been swallowed by nature. Its outlines are barely discernible, diluted among trees that grow even inside the buildings. Only from the 16th floor of one of its blocks can we see that, indeed, this forest contains a city, as if it were one of those lost cities found by an explorer traveling through the jungle.

Verbitskyi shows us a photograph of a crowded restaurant on his tablet screen. Then he lowers the device, revealing the same scene, now unrecognizable due to overgrown vegetation and the ravages of time. “There’s this idea that Pripyat was a dreary, industrial city,” Verbitskyi says. “That’s not true. Pripyat was a vibrant place. The average age was 27, the streets were full of children, and our salaries were higher than the average in the USSR. There were concerts, restaurants, sports centers… We lived very well.”

We head to what was once his home, where he grew up with his parents and later inherited to start his own family. “It’s number 23 Kurstchova Street,” he says, pointing to the street sign that survives among some branches. “Be careful around the manholes, don’t step in them. That’s where the most radioactivity is.”

Verbitskyi enters through a dilapidated doorway and stands in the middle of what used to be the living room, now covered in rubble. “I remembered it being bigger. This is the second or third time I’ve been here. I don’t like it,” he confesses, gazing out the window. “I jumped out of here one day when my parents came home and I was with a girl. I ran out half-dressed, wearing only one sock,” he recounts, laughing. It’s a sad laugh, like his surroundings.

— How does it feel to come from a city that no longer exists?

— Some friends say they’d prefer it was destroyed. It hurts to see the corpse.

A rabbit the size of a medium-sized dog darts across the path as we leave the ghost town. As we venture deeper into the forest, horses and deer also appear. The exclusion zone has emptied the territory of human presence, and wildlife has flourished, demonstrating that humans are more damaging than nuclear contamination. At least for animals.

A half-hour drive through dense forests and along icy roads leads us to a remote village called Kupovate, made up of a dozen houses shrouded in an imposing silence. Only one of them is inhabited.

Marusia Zaiornaia is one of the last remaining samosely outside the town of Chernobyl. She lives without neighbors for miles around, isolated amid an endless carpet of trees. To make matters worse, most of these forests are riddled with anti-tank mines that the Russian army laid before its withdrawal.

Petite, with chubby cheeks and a toothless mouth, she asks us for a few minutes to change her headscarf. She chooses a floral one and offers us food and homemade vodka in her tiny house, which looks like a toy, with its low ceilings and blue door. “I’m 85 years old, and this has been the hardest winter I’ve ever spent here. It’s likely to be the last.” All her children and grandchildren, who live in Kyiv, insist that she leave the village. She never has. She was evacuated in 1986 and returned a few days later. “I don’t feel lonely. I talk to my cats, I take care of the land, I chop wood, or I go mushroom picking. This is my home; if I leave, I’ll die.”

It’s an opinion deeply ingrained in the soul of every samosely. Valentina Kuharenko is 86 years old and lives in another solitary house a few miles from Chernobyl. Sitting at her kitchen table, seemingly frozen in time, she recounts how the reactor explosion caught her by surprise on April 26, 1986, while she was fishing in the river. “I was with my husband, and we saw a flash in the distance. We didn’t know that everything had ended there.”

She, too, insists on offering food and drink. Her tone is melancholic, punctuated by sighs. “This will never be the same again. I remember when they announced the construction of the power plant, we were so happy. We were so happy because of it and what it gave us. But then it killed us. It destroyed everything.” Valentina Kuharenko sums it up in a truly devastating sentence: “Chernobyl was born in 1193 and died in 1986.”

***

Leaving the Chernobyl ghetto is, in reality, entering the Ukrainian ghetto. The country remains suffocated and harassed by Russia, which sends barrages of drones over towns and cities almost daily. Four years later, much of Ukraine is trying to normalize the unbearable. When air raid sirens sound in Kyiv, hardly anyone looks to the sky, much less runs for cover. Chernobyl workers continue to come and go, entering the exclusion zone every two weeks. The area that, 40 years ago, became a ghetto and that, for the last four, has also had to endure war.

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