Ghosts of the past and present meet as war reaches the nuclear wasteland

THE CHERNOBYL EXCLUSION ZONE — The world’s worst nuclear disaster, which happened just a few miles away, didn’t force 74-year-old Halyna Voloshyna from her home in Chernobyl in 1986.

So when marauding Russian soldiers showed up on her doorstep a little over a year ago, Voloshyna wasn’t even going to let that scare her.

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Instead, during the month that Russian forces occupied this contaminated patch of land known as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Voloshyna became such a nuisance, so they started calling her “the angry granny at the end of the road”.

“They said they were here to free me,” she recalled.

“Get rid of what?” she asked before cursing them.

Voloshyna is one of 99 residents of all life still living in the area, an area covering approximately 2,590 square kilometers of some of the most radioactive soil on the planet.

The disastrous collapse of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant blanketed the region a hundred times more radiation than that released by the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

Chernobyl was also one of the first territories Russian tanks crossed as they left Belarus in hopes of capturing Kiev, the Ukrainian capital some 120 kilometers to the south.

And it was one of the first places they were kicked out of, forced to retire at the end of March last year.

Visiting the area a year later, past calamity and present tragedy meet in strange and fascinating ways.

The contamination of the territory that caused the collapse of Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, and which will continue for the next hundred years, has exposed the dangers of a political culture based on lies.

contributed to disappearance of the communist regime and at the end of Soviet Union.

The invasion of Russia was justified with more lies from the Kremlin:

that the Ukrainian state was a myth and that the Kiev government was controlled by the Nazis.

Now, with the cities of Ukraine leveled to the ground, the ruins of Chernobyl don’t look so otherworldly but rather sadly familiar.

Distant explosions caused by animals trampling Russian-laid mines remind us that this land of the past is much of the present.

The Containment Building and huge sarcophagus built to bury the remains of Reactor Number 4, where two huge explosions blew off the 2,000-ton lid covering the burning core, have long been an object lesson in what can happen when politics is allowed to interfere with the scientific work of producing energy by splitting the atom.

Now it’s happening again.

Russian forces in southern Ukraine are in control of Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, and that facility in Zaporizhia it suffered repeated bombings, raising fears of disasters to occur there.

And in Chernobyl itself, Russian soldiers showed behavior reckless at the beginning of the war.

On the night of the Russians’ invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, there was a dramatic increase in radiation levels, two to eight times higher than usual, in different parts of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, Serhiy Kirejev said. the Ukrainian official responsible for environmental monitoring in that area.

“That was the moment when more than 5000 Russian military vehicles they entered the area, drove on dirt roads and then the soldiers started digging trenches,” Kirejev said.

“They kicked up the radioactive dust that was in the top layer of the soil.”

For the small group of elderly residents who remain in the area, the Russian invasion and nuclear disaster are life-limiting catastrophes.

These recall both events down to the smallest detail.

Visitors are rare these days, but Voloshyna was full of energy as she prepared a variety of food for her visitors and drank a bottle of vodka flavored with local herbs.

Three drinks, he said, were customary for visitors.

Before the meltdown, Voloshyna said, Chernobyl was a city known for its great natural beauty.

She was 36 at the time and the director of the local kindergarten when the night sky lit up before dawn on April 26, 1986.

In the days following the accident, he joined other residents in pouring sand into bags that were flown by helicopters to be dropped at the reactor.

Evacuation orders came in May and some 200,000 people were ultimately displaced, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, but Voloshyna was not among them.

He hid inside his home after police ordered residents to leave, though authorities sealed off his home from the outside.

The next day, he saw how the policemen shot all the dogs.

Then they cut off electricity and water.

But Voloshyna was determined to stay in the house her grandfather had built more than half a century earlier on the banks of the Pripyat River.

Unlike when the collapse occurred, the danger from last winter’s Russian assault was immediately apparent.

That night, a resident, 86-year-old Evgen Markevych, wrote his thoughts in his diary.

“Regret has come,” she wrote.

“They are shooting. Putin is like Hitler. Russian troops have captured the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

Voloshyna was determined to stay.

“It was crazy,” she said.

“They went on for days – an onslaught of tanks, helicopters and all kinds of guns all the time.”

One morning, he said, he heard Russians yelling at a neighbor and ransacking his home.

He rushed out to confront them.

“There were 15 of them with machine guns,” he said.

“I didn’t let them into my house. I started yelling at them.”

Two days later, her neighbor warned Voloshyna that her two adult children were in danger.

One of them had previously served in the Ukrainian army and would therefore be of particular interest to the Russians.

So, under cover of darkness, the two men sneaked down to the river bank behind the house, loaded two bicycles onto two small motorboats, and set off.

They hid for more than a month.

“Only when the area was cleared by the Ukrainian military were they able to go home,” he said.

His youngest son left early to join the army. In recent months he has been fighting in Bakhmut.

Voloshyna wiped away a tear and said she hoped to see him back home one day.

c.2023 The New York Times Society