This article is based on interviews and research by the Reckoning Project, a multinational group of journalists and researchers collecting evidence of war crimes in Ukraine.
On the afternoon of February 24, 2022, two Russian army commanders, wearing black uniforms with no insignia, entered the office of Valentyn Heyko, the shift supervisor at the Chornobyl State Enterprise. In a room with a window overlooking the decommissioned reactor, General Sergey Burakov and Colonel Andrey Frolenkov told Heyko that they had taken control of the nuclear plant. Russia had invaded Ukraine only that day, crossing the Belarusian border just a few miles to the north.
Heyko told the Russians that he was obligated, as a professional, to conduct a security briefing with any visitor to his facility, to make sure that they were aware of the numerous health hazards present at the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history. To start with, he told them that they had not taken control of a nuclear-power plant. What they had captured, Heyko told the invaders, was the highly contaminated territory of a decommissioned facility that has not produced any electricity since its shutdown in 2000. That was the year the Ukrainian government formed the Chornobyl State Enterprise to oversee the containment of the site’s environmental harms. (I am using the Ukrainian transliteration of Chornobyl, not the Russian, Chernobyl, in this article.)
Heyko, a nuclear engineer who had come to work at Chornobyl just a year after the disaster, then began to itemize the safety precautions visitors have to follow. These include radiation checkups upon entering and exiting high-risk areas, a ban on eating or drinking outside designated areas, and numerous other restrictions that the Russian commanders and the hundreds of troops they had just brought to the plant had zero chance of following during their military operation. Finally, Heyko urged the Russians to strictly observe Ukrainian law with regard to radiation safety in order to ensure their well-being. Heyko had repeated this routine security briefing, worded in nauseating bureaucratese, hundreds of times.
The invaders, taken aback, immediately agreed to follow Heyko’s rules, even though doing so meant abiding by the laws of the country that their military was trying to annihilate. They explained that their mission was to protect a strategically important facility that was now under their control; at the moment, Russian troops were swiftly advancing toward the Ukrainian capital, which lay just 100 miles to the south.
The Russians assured Heyko that their “special military operation” would last only a few days, after which the Ukrainian army would lay down its arms in much the same way that the unit of the national guard in charge of Chornobyl had done. (The Ukrainians had actually followed international protocols that prohibit hostilities on the territory of nuclear facilities.) In a conciliatory tone, the Russians added that they had captured the plant without a single shot fired. Heyko responded that he hoped they would soon go back home without a single shot fired as well.
Chornobyl, the Russians at this meeting seemed to assume, would be but a brief stopover on the glide path to Kyiv’s central square, where they would enjoy their victory parade. But the Russians’ five-week sojourn at the contaminated site, where they forced a hostile local staff to continue working at gunpoint, soon became something else entirely. Chornobyl, not for the first time, had become a strategic nightmare. Born of imperial arrogance and self-deception, the botched occupation of the decommissioned nuclear plant foreshadowed Russia’s larger failures in Ukraine.
The phrase before the war generally means something different to people in Chornobyl than it does to those elsewhere in Ukraine. It is spoken, often, not in reference to the time before 2022, or even 2014, when the Russian invasion of Ukraine really began. Rather, before the war means “before the 1986 nuclear disaster.” In a grim slip of the tongue, some veterans of that event call it nuclear war.
Last year’s Russian occupation provided the Chornobyl State Enterprise personnel with new shared points of reference. On March 9, at 11:22 a.m., the plant went into full-blackout mode because of the shelling of the electric grid in the Kyiv region. If electricity were not quickly restored, the staff would not be able to monitor the developments inside the ruins of reactor No. 4, where a chain reaction leading to a nuclear explosion remains a possibility; nor could they cool the disposed nuclear fuel contained in Chornobyl’s storage facility.
A full blackout at a nuclear plant is a scenario that haunts scientists’ dreams. Ironically, the fatal 1986 accident in Chornobyl happened during a botched safety test aimed at dealing with exactly this: an emergency shutdown of the reactor in case of full blackout—the sort caused, for example, by a military attack. In 2022, Chornobyl relied on diesel generators for backup. These generators had enough fuel to keep the systems running for 14 hours. What would happen after that was anyone’s guess.
Electricians and engineers at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant describe what happened when Russian military action disrupted its electricity supply in March 2022. (Video fragment from the documentary Chornobyl 22, courtesy of Oleksiy Radynski and the Reckoning Project)
Heyko abruptly summoned the Russian commanders to his office. The Russian invasion of the Kyiv region was about to produce another planetary-scale disaster, he told them. To avoid it, he needed just one thing from the Russians: diesel fuel. Lots of it.
The commanders agreed. The task of managing diesel-fuel supply fell to one of the plant’s engineers, Valeriy Semenov, the de facto head of security at the occupied facility. According to Heyko’s calculations, Chornobyl required about 30 tons of fuel every day. For three nights, convoys of military fuel trucks carrying the required amount of diesel arrived at the station. Soon, the disgruntled Russian commanders showed up in Heyko’s office to tell him that his decommissioned nuclear plant had consumed half the fuel intended for their front line near Kyiv.
The Russian commanders had every reason to worry. By mid-March, Russia’s blitzkrieg plan was in tatters, its troops stuck in the Kyiv suburbs of Bucha and Irpin, where they faced fierce local resistance. With overstretched supply routes vulnerable to local sabotage, getting fuel to Russian troops was a headache even before the Chornobyl plant began consuming truckloads of diesel. The Russian commanders told Heyko and Semenov that they had a better idea for fueling the nuclear plant.
On February 23, 2022—the day before the Russian invasion—the Ukrainian government had disconnected the country’s electric grid for the first time, in testing mode, from the power grids of Belarus and Russia and connected it to those of the European Union instead. When the invasion started, this testing mode became the status quo. But the physical power lines that had once connected Ukraine to Belarus still existed; they just lay on Russian-controlled territory. Now the Russians reconnected Chornobyl to the Belarusian power grid. The Ukrainian plant was in this sense yoked back to Russia—not to supply energy to the empire, as it did in Soviet days, but to sap the resources from Moscow’s colonial war.
Vitaliy Popov, a 65-year-old engineer at Chornobyl, had a sense of déjà vu. In May 1986, he had been on vacation with his wife and newborn child when he learned of the disaster at the nuclear plant. He volunteered to return to Chornobyl and help contain the damage. Now, in mid-March 2022, he learned that the Russians had at last agreed to rotate out some of the plant’s exhausted personnel. And again he volunteered, this time to enter de facto captivity at the Russian-occupied disaster site—in order, as he put it, “not to let 1986 happen again.”
Together with dozens of his colleagues, Popov set out from Slavutych, the town where most of Chornobyl’s personnel live. Even getting to the plant was risky. The route passed through Russian-occupied parts of northern Ukraine and a narrow strip of Belarusian territory, where all the bridges crossing the Dnipro River had been blown up. The nuclear specialists traversed the river on leaky wooden boats manned by local fishermen.
When Popov arrived at the plant, it teemed with Soviet-era military vehicles, just as it had after the disaster in 1986. And just as then, young soldiers openly ignored all norms of radiation safety. Men rested on the contaminated ground and consumed their rations in the open air, where eating significantly increased the risk of radiation poisoning. But there was a crucial difference. In 1986, Popov recalled, whatever the Soviet army’s blunders, it was performing a task to stop a meltdown that would have made much of Eurasia uninhabitable. What was the Russian army doing in Chornobyl now?
The 2022 occupation, three weeks old at this point, had the macabre air of a cyberpunk fantasy. The Russian commanders had largely ignored Valentyn Heyko’s security briefing. They hadn’t even shared its content with their immediate subordinates—so Serhiy Dedyukhin, the physical-security engineer at the plant, understood when a high-ranking Russian officer asked him: “I see there’s a nuclear-waste-storage area at the plant. Is it true we’re not supposed to dig in there?”
The Russians brought their own dosimetrists to measure radiation on the Chornobyl grounds. On the basis of their alleged findings, the commanders proudly informed their soldiers that the place was as safe as a tourist resort. Some of the occupiers even jokingly referred to Chornobyl as their “sanatorium,” a place to rest between trips to the front line near Kyiv. More than that, Chornobyl had effectively become a nuclear shield—a location where the Russians knew that the Ukrainian army would not bomb them.
As time went by, the invaders’ mood darkened, and the atmosphere grew tense. Serhiy Dedyukhin heard a Russian soldier who was manning a checkpoint say, as if to himself but loud enough for the engineer to hear: “I’d rather have all of these people here gunned down.”
At first Dedyukhin froze. Then he approached the soldier with a question: “Would you yourself rather go home in a coffin made out of zinc or out of lead?”
The soldier was briefly puzzled. Then he must have understood: Lead coffins are meant for highly radioactive bodies. Dedyukhin was reminding him that Chornobyl’s staff, uniquely trained to contain the site’s deadly potential, held a terrible shield of their own.
Part of the border between Ukraine and Belarus lies within the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, a 1,000-square-mile area, surrounded by barbed wire and army checkpoints, so contaminated with the fallout from the 1986 disaster that it has been deemed unsuitable for life. A foreign invasion through this radioactive territory once seemed unthinkable. But when Russian military convoys crossed into Ukraine on February 24, 2022, speeding toward Kyiv, they blew past the Dytiatky checkpoint, the entry to the exclusion zone, where visitors normally had to be inspected for radioactive debris. The Russians turned Dytiatky into a normal military checkpoint—and inadvertently carried radioactive dust along with them toward Kyiv, effectively expanding the invisible borders of the exclusion zone to all the territory they occupied.
The exclusion zone has evolved over the decades into a complex ecosystem in which rare species of animals, birds, and plants have flourished with little human interference. But humans also live in the zone, quite a few of whom have nothing to do with the Chornobyl plant or the nuclear industry. Unlike the nearby city of Pripyat, which was completely abandoned in 1986, the ancient town of Chornobyl is a fully functioning urban settlement where ecological, emergency, and administrative workers toil in shifts. The town also has several hundred permanent residents known as “self-settlers,” most of them locals who insisted on returning to their homes after the 1986 disaster made them ostensibly uninhabitable. In the early hours of the invasion, most of the shift workers evacuated the town. But for the self-settlers, the Russian invasion seemed like a bogus reason to agree to one more exile from their land.
On the day of the invasion, 84-year-old Yevhen Markevych noted in his diary: “A sorrow has come. They’re shooting. Putin is like Hitler.” He was 4 years old when the Nazis invaded Ukraine, and he still remembered seeing his Jewish neighbors taken away to be executed. Now Russians were prowling the streets of his hometown, looking for Ukrainian partisans and saboteurs. Markevych, who for years had worked as a dosimetrist, had a brief conversation with the soldiers and concluded that they had no idea about radiation and its dangers. He wrote in his diary: “Poor lads. They don’t know where they are or what they are doing here.”
Another Chornobyl resident, Mykhailo Shylan, is a former schoolteacher and local history enthusiast who has organized a museum in his front yard. He displays war-related objects he has found in the woods surrounding Chornobyl, which were the site of fierce fighting in both world wars and yield relics dating back at least a century. His museum includes remains of World War I munitions, Nazi artifacts, and Soviet-era propaganda items. In 2022, Russian soldiers squatted in Shylan’s guesthouse for several days. After they left, the museum custodian added some brand-new, but already historical, items to his collection. Among them, he most proudly displays a sardine can that features the logo of the Russian army and an inscription: Russian fish world.
The Chornobyl exclusion zone was home to a hostile local population eager to undermine the Russian occupation. But the invaders searched in vain for armed saboteurs. The partisan movement that thrived in this postapocalyptic landscape was digital: Locals used their mobile phones to clandestinely film the movements of Russian military convoys and transfer the recordings to their contacts in the Ukrainian armed forces. At the plant itself, mobile and internet service had been severed, but old landlines still worked. Oleksandr Kalishuk, an engineer at the plant, called his contacts in Slavutych to pass on information for the Ukrainian military. Every time he hung up, Kalishuk expected the Russians to come after him, but they never did.
By the end of March, the plant personnel became convinced that the Russians were preparing for battle at the disaster site. The soldiers built barricades out of sandbags they filled with radioactive sand they’d dug from right around the plant. Firing points were erected on top of the plant’s buildings. Several old, dysfunctional military vehicles appeared on the plant’s territory, apparently to be used as dummies at military checkpoints. The staff immediately recognized these vehicles: They were the ones used to eliminate the fallout of the 1986 disaster, and since then had been installed in an open-air museum in town. The vehicles were so highly contaminated that museum visitors were not allowed within a dozen meters of them. Now they were sitting in the middle of the nuclear plant, with uninformed soldiers manning checkpoints right next to them.
Soon rumors reached the staff that the Russians were digging trenches in the Red Forest, the most contaminated part of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. This woodland, adjacent to the plant, had suffered such heavy radioactive fallout in the summer of 1986 that its pine trees turned red. The poisoned trees were cut down and buried under the very ground where the Russians now started to dig.
Local radiation experts discuss contamination levels in the Red Forest after the Russian takeover of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. (Video fragment from the documentary Chornobyl 22, courtesy of Oleksiy Radynski and the Reckoning Project)
How was this even possible? Valentyn Heyko had an inkling after speaking with Andrey Frolenkov, one of the Russian commanders. The takeover of the Chornobyl plant had gone so smoothly, Frolenkov boasted, because the facility had an identical twin in Russia. The Russian military had apparently used this doppelgänger, the Kursk Nuclear Power Station, to plan and rehearse the Chornobyl takeover—including the siting of defensive trenches around the plant.
The Kursk nuclear station is indeed similar to Chornobyl in every respect but one: Its territory is not radioactively contaminated.
By late March, Russian forces were facing a rout in the Kyiv region, and the troops in Chornobyl began looting the area for anything of value they could take home. They didn’t bother to check the radiation levels of their bounty. What they couldn’t carry away, they destroyed. Upon their departure, they took with them 169 soldiers of the Ukrainian national guard whom they’d seized as prisoners during the occupation. One hundred and eight are still in captivity at the time of writing.
Russia has not made public the fate of the soldiers it stationed at Chornobyl. Liudmyla Kozak, a physical protection engineer at the plant, says that she saw Russian soldiers on a bus bound for Belarus vomiting, and sources in Belarus told CNN that some Russian troops were treated for radiation sickness at a special research center there.
Russian soldiers retreating from the Chornobyl nuclear plant took radioactive souvenirs with them, two of the plant’s engineers recount. (Video fragment from the documentary Chornobyl 22, courtesy of Oleksiy Radynski and the Reckoning Project)
Russia’s defeat in the battle for Kyiv was not just the result of poor military planning. The invaders failed to understand the country they’d entered, with its manifold differences from Russia. Many of those differences are themselves the result of the colonial exploitation of Ukraine—a country where a unique community of professionals tended the lands polluted by the toxic legacies of past empires.
In the Russian imperial mindset, Ukraine equals Russia just as the Kursk nuclear-power plant equals the one in Chornobyl. The two assumptions are equally wrong. The Russians had to learn this the hard way.
*Lead image: Illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: Dimitar Dilkoff / AFP / Getty; STF / AFP/ Getty; Library of Congress; Oleksiy Radynski / The Reckoning Project.