How the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Escaped Another Catastrophe

It was Lyudmyla Kozak who saw the Russians come first. “Suddenly. From every nook and cranny.” She was on night duty at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant when on February 24 at 5 a.m. loudspeakers blared that the Russian invasion of Ukraine had begun. The personnel of the partially dismantled nuclear power plant switched to the state of emergency: protocols in operation, lights off, seat belts fastened.

A few hours later it became clear that the day shift, who had to replace Kozak and her about a hundred colleagues present, would not be able to reach Chernobyl. The train with which teams relieved each other twice a day no longer ran. They called and texted at home: whether everything was going well with family and colleagues, who almost all live in the city of Slavoetych.

Kozak (45) was concerned about her husband and son at home and her daughter in Lviv. But she had no choice but to continue her work as the surveillance camera supervisor. Because of safety in the disaster area, it is strictly defined which employee is allowed to go where. It is her job to keep an eye on her monitor to make sure no one enters the forbidden territory.

Staring wearily at the video screens, she watched the unthinkable happen at three o’clock in the afternoon. “Suddenly the Russians invaded from all directions. Men in black uniforms. First on foot, then with tanks,” she says. Kozak brought in a colleague to show with which heavy artillery they entered the prohibited ‘exclusion zone’. “I panicked,” she says softly. “We are trained to deal with explosions and radiation, but not prepared for an invasion. I lived under the illusion that the Russians would ignore Chernobyl for fear of being exposed to radiation.”

Held hostage

Instead, Russian military personnel held her and her colleagues more or less hostage for weeks at the disastrous nuclear power plant. They stockpiled heavy weapons right next to nuclear reactors and dug into radioactively contaminated soil. And when they withdrew after five weeks, they stole crucial equipment.

“We have only just escaped another catastrophe,” Kozaks looks back on a terrace in Slavoetych. Now that this region of Ukraine has been liberated, she and her colleagues can share their most fearful memories. And show what risks Russia is taking by besieging Ukraine’s vital and dangerous infrastructure.

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The explosion of reactor 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on April 26, 1986 is the largest nuclear disaster in history. A dramatic test and a design flaw in the only three-year-old reactor caused an explosion that blew the roof off, scattering a toxic graphite cloud containing the radioactive radiation from hundreds of Hiroshima. Moscow tried to keep the catastrophe a secret until the nuclear dust spread across Europe. Extinguishing the fire, clearing the rubble, evacuating 200,000 local residents too slowly has killed thousands of people, especially in the republics of Ukraine and Belarus. Lyudmyla Kozak’s father was one of the victims. He had helped with the clean-up as a ‘volunteer’, and died of the consequences at the age of 45.

Beginning of the end

The smoldering reactor symbolizes failing Soviet technology, deadly misinformation and incompetent communist leadership. The disaster heralded the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, five years later. The imploded empire that Vladimir Putin is imperialistically homesick for. In his bid to take over Kiev early this year, he also occupied the historic and polluted ground of Chernobyl.

Apart from the staff, escorted tourists and some recalcitrant elderly who have returned, no one is still allowed to enter the restricted zone around the plant. Because of the radiation, life within this imperfect circle with a radius of 30 kilometers is considered too dangerous even 36 years after the nuclear explosion, including in the ghost towns of Chernobyl and Prypyat.

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Slavoetych, built in the late 1980s as a new settlement for the Chernobyl workers and their families, is almost equally astonishing. The city was built with the intention of running the remaining three reactors and even building a few more. One hundred thousand people could be accommodated in a brand new Soviet oasis.

The city is spacious, with lots of greenery, squares, monuments, playgrounds and bicycle paths. But flats with wooden balconies in the Tbilisi district and tiled residential towers in the Yerevan quarter are empty as the nuclear power plant is being decommissioned and requires fewer and fewer staff. The last reactor was also turned off in 2000 and only a few thousand personnel are needed for cooling and processing the nuclear fuel.

The city is located a safe fifty kilometers from Chernobyl and not only on the other bank of the Dnieper, but also on the other side of the border with Belarus. Like a kind of appendix, the southernmost tip of Belarus hangs between their hometown and the Ukrainian nuclear power plant. With a train connection over the water and through the dense forest in the northern neighboring country, the staff went to work for decades without any problems. Until the invasion of February 24, when Russia also used Belarus as a springboard to launch the attack on Ukraine, this suddenly became hostile territory.

Toxic trenches

Electrician Mychajlo Machyna (56) heard the war before seeing it. “Maintenance of the power station does cause explosions more often, but this sound of the explosions was different. There was shooting.” While others sat in the office or in the bomb shelter, he anxiously went over his maintenance jobs. Until he was stopped by Russian soldiers. Machyna served in the Soviet army before joining the nuclear power plant. Russian is his native language. But he felt nothing but hate.

He and colleagues continue to find it incomprehensible that the Russians on their way to Kiev with their heavy vehicles took the route through the exclusion zone, spewing radioactive dust in the process. And that they even set up camp there. “Those madmen dug trenches without any protection in ‘the Red Forest’ – the place with the most radiation,” says Oleksi Shelesti (42), shaking his head. He is the team leader of the electrical workshop and Machyna’s boss. Measurements showed increased radiation in the first days of the invasion. “That was especially dangerous for the Russians themselves, not for the employees,” says Shelesti. A Russian soldier would have died of poisoning.

The Russians not only came with military superiority, they had experts from the state nuclear agency Rosatom with them. Shelesti: “They were clearly planning to take over and not leave.” As if the war had already been won.

But the war was in full swing and that caused serious problems at the nuclear power plant. First, the employees could not be relieved. On March 9, the day after Russia seized Europe’s largest nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhya, the power supply in Chernobyl went out. “We have a diesel generator. We sometimes use it for half an hour, but never for days. We didn’t have enough fuel,” says Machyna.

Without electricity, the nuclear waste from nuclear power plants cannot be cooled. “It could have ended dramatically,” said the electrician. Fortunately, the Russians were convinced by that. They supplied thousands of liters of diesel a day from the Russian war stock. And after five anxious days ensured that the nuclear power plant was connected to the power grid of Belarus.

The workers want to emphasize: Chernobyl was not Butsha or Mariupol. The Russian military did not kill, rape and bomb there as elsewhere in Ukraine. They took the technical knowledge of nuclear power plant personnel seriously. But due to the exhaustion and constant threat, “the mental damage among the staff is considerable,” says team leader Shelesti.

The employees found themselves in a completely unpredictable and hopeless situation. One of Shelesti’s subordinates was followed everywhere he went in the field by a soldier with a rifle at the ready. “He is not well.”

Lyudmyla Kozak was locked up in the Chernobyl administrative building, sometimes in the company of about eight hundred Russian soldiers. “This was their resting place because they knew Ukraine would never shell a nuclear power plant. Here they got completely drunk and smeared their poo on the wall.” She was very concerned that the soldiers would make a fool of themselves with their tanks, mines and grenades and cause an explosion.

The longer the situation lasted, the more the employees dared to contradict and prank the Russians. Electrician Machyna kept the lights on and off on the floor where the Russians had quartered. Every now and then he would set off the fire alarm. Oleksandr Cherepanov (41), who is responsible for processing the nuclear waste at the plant, tells with a chuckle how he walked past Russian soldiers with a colleague and asked him loudly: “Have you taken your anti-radiation pills?” The colleague played along and replied: “No man, they’re all gone.” To which Cherepanov frightened the Russians by saying: “Oh no, then you can never have children again!”

Changing of the Guard

As the battle for Kiev dragged on for weeks, the nuclear power plant’s leadership managed to negotiate on March 20 that the workers would be relieved. Because of the broken bridges, this was only possible with a wooden boat for eight people on the Dnieper. Kozak, Machyna, and Shelesti were sailed across in the cold night. Cherepanov, father of four young children, decided to stay. Not thinking that Slavutych himself would be captured a few days later.

But on March 31, as suddenly as they had come, the Russians stopped their advance towards Kiev and the soldiers left Chernobyl. “They took everything that was loose. Fire extinguishers, laptops, printers, tools, old bicycles. They destroyed the rest,” says Cherepanov, who only returned home after 45 days. The total damage is still being calculated. But one thing is certain: the Chernobyl community has a new trauma.

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