Happy Nice Mall

Chernobyl, Ukraine — One of the most toxic places in the world, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone was probably not the best choice as a preparation site for an attack on the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. However, this did not bother the Russian generals, who seized the area in the early stages of the war.

“We told them not to do it, it was dangerous, but they ignored us,” Valeriy Simyonov, chief safety engineer of the Chernobyl nuclear site, said in an interview.

Russian forces, seemingly unaffected by security concerns, navigate the terrain with bulldozers and tanks, digging trenches and bunkers, and exposing themselves to potentially harmful doses of radiation below the surface.

During a visit to the recently liberated nuclear station that was the scene of the world’s worst nuclear disaster in 1986, wind swirled dust vortices along the roads, and while Ukrainian nuclear officials said no major radiation spill had been triggered, there were scenes of neglect of safety everywhere. One-month military occupation of Russia.

The Russian army had dug an elaborate maze of sunken walkways and bunkers in a large trench a few hundred yards outside the town of Chernobyl. An abandoned armored personnel carrier was sitting nearby.

The soldiers had apparently camped in the radioactive forest for weeks. Duration international nuclear safety experts They say they have not confirmed any cases of radiation sickness among the military, and that cancers and other potential health problems associated with radiation exposure may not develop until decades later.

Mr Simyonov said the Russian military has deployed officers from a nuclear, biological and chemical unit, as well as experts from Russia’s state nuclear power company Rosatom, who consulted with Ukrainian scientists.

But he said Russian nuclear experts had little influence over military commanders. The soldiers seemed more preoccupied with planning the attack on Kiev and after that they failed and used Chernobyl as an escape route to Belarus for their badly battered troops.

“They came and did whatever they wanted,” said Mr. Simyonov in the area around the station. Consolidation continued despite the efforts of him and other Ukrainian nuclear engineers and technicians, who remained in the area throughout the occupation, working around the clock and unable to leave except for a shift change at the end of March.

Earthworks were not the only instances of recklessness in treating an area so toxic that it had the potential to spread radiation far beyond Ukraine’s borders.

In one particularly malicious act, a Russian soldier from the chemical, biological and nuclear protection unit took a source of cobalt-60 with his bare hands at a landfill and exposed himself to so much radiation in a matter of seconds that Mr. Simyonov fell off the scale of a Geiger counter. , said. “It is unclear what happened to the man,” he said.

Mr Simyonov said the most alarming moment came in mid-March when electrical power was cut off to a cooling pond that stored spent nuclear fuel rods containing much more radioactive material than was scattered in the 1986 disaster. This has raised a fire concern among Ukrainians if the water that cools the fuel rods boils and becomes exposed to the air. quickly rejected by experts. “They highlight worst-case scenarios that are possible but not necessarily plausible,” he said. Edwin LymanHe’s a reactor expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Experts say the greater risk in a prolonged power outage is that the hydrogen produced by the spent fuel could build up and explode. Bruno Chareyron, laboratory director of CRIIRAD, a French group that monitors radiation risks, noted that a 2008 study at the Chernobyl site suggested that this could happen in about 15 days.

The march to Kiev on the western bank of the Dnipro River began and ended in Chernobyl for the 31st and 36th Combined Armed Armies of the Russian army, traveling with an auxiliary of special forces and ethnic Chechen fighters.

The contingent entered Ukraine on February 24, fought in the suburbs of Kiev for most of a month and then retreated, leaving behind burned armored vehicles, losing its own war, widespread destruction and hundreds of evidence of human rights abuses. Civilian corpses on the streets in the town of Bucha.

As Russian troops retreated from Chernobyl, they blew up a bridge in the exclusion zone and placed a dense labyrinth of anti-personnel mines, trip wires, and booby traps around the disused station. Two Ukrainian soldiers stepped on the mines last week, according to the Ukrainian government agency that manages the site.

In a strange final sign of the unit’s misfortunes, Ukrainian soldiers found discarded tools and electronics on the roads in the Chernobyl area. These were apparently looted from towns deeper in Ukraine and discarded for unclear reasons in the final retreat. Reporters found a roadside washing machine just outside the town of Chernobyl.

Employees of the Chernobyl-based exclusion zone management agency suffered under Russian occupation, but nothing close to the barbarism that Russian forces inflicted on civilians in Bucha and other cities around Kyiv.

Natasha Siloshenko, 45, a cook at a cafeteria serving nuclear workers, said the Russians arrived in seemingly endless columns on the first day of the war. She had watched cautiously from a side street.

“There was a sea of ​​vehicles,” he said. “They came in waves from the area, driving quickly towards Kiev.”

As far as he could see, there was little or no warfare in the area. Armored columns just passed.

During the occupation, Russian soldiers searched the offices of nuclear technicians and engineers, firefighters and support personnel in the town of Chernobyl. They “took valuables” from the apartments, he said, but there was little violence.

Workers tried to warn the Russians about the radiation risks, but to no avail.

After 36 years, background radiation in most of the 18-mile Exclusion Zone around the nuclear power plant poses insufficient risks and is approximately equivalent to high-altitude aircraft flight. But in invisible hotspots, some covering an area of ​​an acre or two, some only a few square metres, radiation can be up to thousands of times normal ambient levels.

Nuclear expert Mr Chareyron said a soldier in such a spot would be exposed every hour to what experts consider to be a safe border for an entire year. The most dangerous isotopes in soil are Cesium 137, Strontium 90 and various plutonium isotopes. The days or weeks spent in these areas have a high risk of causing cancer, he said.

Throughout the region, radioactive particles settled in the soil to a depth of several inches to one foot. They pose little threat if left underground, with half-lives often harmless in decades or hundreds of years.

Until the Russian invasion, the main threat of this contamination was its absorption by moss and trees, which could burn in forest fires, the poison being spread by smoke or by birds that ate radioactive, land-dwelling insects.

Ms. Siloshenko said that the workers told the Russians, “We said to them, ‘This is the district, you can’t go to certain places.’” “They ignored us”

In a digging position, Russian troops dug a bunker on the sandy side of a road embankment and left piles of rubbish – food packages, discarded boots, a blackened cooking pot – suggesting that they lived in the underground space for a long time. .

Nearby, a bulldozer had dug up the topsoil to make trenches and half a dozen trenches for artillery emplacements.

The surrounding forest had recently burned, suggesting that a fire swept the area during the Russian occupation, adding dust from disturbed ground as well as radioactive smoke to which Russian soldiers were exposed.

Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said on Thursday that the agency was unable to verify reports of Russian soldiers affected by radiation in the area or independently assess radiation levels in the area. He said the agency’s automatic radiation sensors at Chernobyl had not been operating for more than a month.

Kateryna Pavlova, spokesperson for Ukraine’s Chernobyl Zone Management Agency, said that the Ukrainian government’s radiation monitors stopped working on the first day of the war. Readings from satellites showed slightly elevated radiation in some areas after the Russian invasion, she said.

Pavlova said armored vehicles operating on steps rather than wheels pose a primary risk to radiation safety in the wider area, as they churned up radioactive soil and spread it over regions of Belarus and Russia as they retreated. “The next person could be contaminated,” she said.

Interviewed at the nuclear station on Thursday evening, shift supervisor Sergei Makluk said that although the five-day power outage did not cause any catastrophes, it still causes great concern among power plant operators.

The standby generators that come into operation require approximately 18,000 gallons of diesel fuel per day. Mr. Makluk said that in the early days, Russian officers reassured factory workers that they had enough fuel drawn from trucked materials for armored vehicles in the conflict in the Kyiv suburbs. But on the fifth day, due to the army’s well-documented logistical problems, officers said they would no longer be supplying diesel.

“There is not enough fuel for the front,” they said, and instead a power cable going to Belarus should be used to draw electricity from the Belarusian grid to cool the waste pond.

Chief security engineer, Mr. Simyonov, described the threat to stop the supply of diesel for generators as “blackmail” to force authorities in Belarus to resolve the issue. But it did, electricity came back in time, and nuclear fuel never came close to overheating.

As a result, trenching and other questionable activities pose a much lower risk than a tailings pond, and most of it for the Russian soldiers themselves, Mr. Simyonov said sarcastically, adding: “We invite them to dig more trenches here, if they want to.”

Contributed by reporting William J. Broad from New York.