Returning to hell: How Chornobyl NPP workers voluntarily went under Russian occupation in 2022

Takeways

• The Chornobyl accident was caused by many factors, but ultimately, the Soviet management system was to blame. Why did it happen?
• The station employee who pressed the AZ-5 button did not know that this would lead to an accident. How could this have happened?
• In March 2022, people from Slavutych voluntarily agreed to go under Russian occupation. What was the reason?
• How did the Ukrainians sow panic among the Russians through the trenches in the Red Forest?
• Where in the Exclusion Zone is it safe to be, and why is radiation scattered in spots?
• What problems did the liquidators and evacuees face after the accident?

Why Soviet system is to blame for Chornobyl accident

Nowadays, we know that the Chornobyl disaster occurred due to a combination of design flaws in the RBMK-1000 reactor, the lack of information about undocumented reactor properties, and the peculiarities of the Soviet control system among the operators of Unit 4.

The operators did not know that at low power and with a large amount of steam, pressing the emergency stop button of the AZ-5 would, on the contrary, rock the reactor and cause an explosion. Similar incidents at other RBMK plants were not publicly discussed, and no lessons were learned.

"The entire Soviet system is to blame for the Chornobyl accident: the engineers who planned the reactor, because of bureaucracy, because of fear for their lives - themselves and their loved ones - did not describe some of the reactor's properties to their colleagues. And the person who pressed the AZ-5 button did not know that this would lead to an accident. The coincidence of factors, concealment of data, and so on - all the Soviet system that led to such an accident. The workers were blamed, but none of the RBMK project managers or those who built the system were punished," says Yaroslav Yemelianenko.

Yaroslav Yemelianenko, co-founder of the Chornobyl Tour tour operator, head of the Association of Chornobyl Tour Operators (Vitalii Nosach/RBC-Ukraine)

However, the Chornobyl accident undermined trust in the Soviet government because they tried to hide the truth about it. The importance of openness has been discussed more actively. The enormous costs of the aftermath weakened the overburdened economy of the USSR, and in Ukraine, this further strengthened the desire for independence.

"The events of Chornobyl did not remain in 1986. They continue today, with the Russian occupation of Chornobyl in 2022. 39 years ago, Moscow jeopardized the entire world's security, which then had to deal with the consequences. And in today's war, the Russian occupation of the Chornobyl NPP, Zaporizhzhia NPP in Enerhodar, and the recent Russian drone attack on the shelter in Chornobyl are all examples of the world's first nuclear terrorism," says Kateryna Aslamova.

For her, the most important lesson of Chornobyl in 2025 is that the threat to the security of the whole world remains, and it comes from Russia. "If in 1986 they got away with it, now the lesson is that the world should not allow Russia to continue to commit such crimes with impunity," she notes.

People consciously went under Russian occupation. What Happened at Chornobyl NPP in March 2022

Russian occupiers added another uncultured layer of events to the events of 1986, which will also be told about on tours of Chornobyl someday, Yaroslav Yemelianenko notes.

Russian occupiers used nuclear power plants as a shield. The problem of recapturing these territories was that Ukraine, unlike Russia, is guided by international norms that prohibit military operations on the territory of nuclear facilities, so we could not attack the Russian occupiers in these territories, says Kateryna Aslamova.

"The Russians deployed military equipment and military warehouses there. They disrupted work processes, and violated all possible international conventions because no military operations can be carried out on the territory of nuclear facilities," she says.

"The Russian military was tasked with occupying the Chornobyl NPP, and they blocked some processes. They searched the premises and looted some of them. Russian occupiers put pressure on ChNPP workers, and did not allow them to rest properly to do their job. They allowed several critical situations when there was a power outage, and electricity is critically needed for the functioning of the Chornobyl NPP and the structures where spent nuclear fuel is stored for cooling," says Yemelianenko.

Kateryna Aslamova with tourists in Prypiat (photo: Yaroslav Yemelianenko)

When one shift was working day and night under Russian occupation, Slavutych's colleagues expressed a desire to replace them.

"They were going into captivity and did not know what would happen to them, whether they would return alive. Imagine: people left their homes and consciously went into occupation. They replaced those who had been working for 600 hours without a break. They are heroes because it was their responsible choice, which they were not forced to make, but it was necessary to ensure the safety of the Chornobyl NPP. The station workers were transported there by boat across the Dnipro River because the railroad connection that transited through Belarus was destroyed," he recalls.

Later, the Armed Forces of Ukraine drove the Russians out of there and released the workers who had been under Russian occupation. As soon as the Russian occupiers left the Chornobyl zone, the work of most critical Chornobyl enterprises was restored.

The next day, after the news of the de-occupation of the Kyiv region, people cut off Yaroslav's phone, asking if they could get to Chornobyl to see what the Russian occupiers had done there. But the Exclusion Zone is still closed to tourists: only delegations are taken there with separate permits. However, everything is going to be in place so that soon it will be accessible to tourists, albeit with certain restrictions.

Previously, Chornobyl NPP employees used to transit to work through Belarus by train. Since all these bridges were blown up, the geography of the trip is now through Kyiv. They have to travel to work for half a day, and after their shift, they have to return home for the same amount of time. Despite this, the processes at the Chornobyl station are taking place on time.

Red forest and trenches. How panic was stirred up among Russians

During the Russian occupation of Chornobyl, there was an episode that was reported by many Ukrainian and foreign media: in the radiation-contaminated Chornobyl Red Forest, the Russian occupiers began digging trenches and raised clouds of radioactive dust.

It was a story that Yaroslav Yemelianenko now recalls as an information and psychological operation that sowed panic among Russians. And this story originated from the information voiced by the employees of the Chornobyl station under occupation. Back then, they rarely got in touch and sent text messages whenever they could. One day, the workers managed to say that the Russians had dug in the Red Forest.

A hill on the eastern edge of the Red Forest (photo: wikipedia.org)

"At first, I wrote a cautious post about it. Like, we received information that they dug trenches in the radioactive forest. We have no visual confirmation yet. And if so, it will not be without consequences for them, and they will most likely die. The next day, I had 17 interviews a day! We promoted this topic and said that the Russians were raising radiation there. This caused panic in the Russian occupiers' social media. They wrote: "Where did we send our son? He will come and infect everyone with radiation." They started making a fuss: "Take them away from Chornobyl," Yaroslav Yemelianenko recalls.

Digging trenches would not have caused significant harm to the Russian occupants' bodies: the radiation in the Red Forest was not such that a few days of staying there would have led to death, he assures.

"Of course, nothing good happens from contact with high levels of radiation. But there are no health-critical levels there that were in 1986-1987. However, thanks to this information, we raised a big wave of panic in Russia and Belarus," the source says.

Belarusians also added fuel to the fire. The Belarusian Hayun reported that patients with signs of radiation exposure appeared at the Gomel Center for Radiation Medicine.

Yemelianenko wondered where they could have received this radiation. Later, he realized that the Russians had broken into scientific laboratories, where highly radioactive sources of ionizing radiation were stored for equipment calibration. There were also pieces of the very elephant's foot, frozen magma made of molten concrete, metal, reactor fuel, and graphite that fused after the reactor explosion.

"Even a small piece of the elephant's foot has an extremely high radiation power. A few hours near such a sample is a threat not only to health but also to life. And so they dragged it all out of the laboratories for still unclear reasons. It turns out to be such a quick karma," Yemelianenko ironically says.

The city of Prypiat (photo: Vitalii Nosach/RBC-Ukraine)

Another consequence of the information and psychological operation Red Forest, Yaroslav says, was that the things that the Russians looted in those weeks in Hostomel, Bucha, and nearby villages and transported through the Chornobyl zone were banned by Belarus from being sent by mail in parcels from Mozyr and other towns.

After that, representatives of the Chornobyl Tour had to deal with the consequences of the dispersal of information about the Russian trenches for a long time in communication with Ukrainians. On the first day after the liberation of the region from the Russian invaders, the Ukrainian military came to the Chornobyl zone to take up positions. Many of them were concerned about the rumors about the radiation that the Russians had dug up, and they had to explain how it really was.

"When the military saw a radiation sign on our armored vehicles at the entrance to the Chornobyl zone, they asked what the levels were in the zone now and where to get a dosimeter. I explained to them: "Guys, don't worry. First of all, all these stories were meant to create panic among the Russians. Radioactive dust was indeed raised, but with every rain, it becomes less. These are very small particles, and they settle down. After that, we repeatedly conducted training for the Ukrainian military and explosives experts who worked in the Chornobyl zone after the de-occupation on radiation safety," Yaroslav recalls.

Elevated background will be there for thousands of years. Where is it safe in Chornobyl

The Chornobyl zone is contaminated with radiation in spots: one area may be clean, and a few meters away, there may be an area with increased radiation.

"For example, if you check the area with a dosimeter somewhere near Rozsokha (a village resettled as a result of the accident - ed.), in one place the indicators are normal, and next to it, they are elevated. It is almost impossible to assess whether a hectare, two hectares, or five hectares are completely clean or completely dirty," says Yemelianenko.

Even in moderately clean areas, there may still be residual contamination. It can be anywhere. This happened because the entire zone was actively used during the liquidation of the accident consequences in 1986, and there was no sarcophagus over ChNPP Unit 4 at that time.

Vehicles drove right out from under the reactor, got dirty, and returned to their bases. With the rain, all this radioactive dirt was washed into the ground. And there were thousands of such cars, and they were all over the exclusion zone. Therefore, the contamination was spread very unevenly, the source explains.

In the Exclusion Zone, one area may be clean, and a few meters away, there may already be a zone with increased radiation (photo: Yaroslav Yemelianenko)

Visitors should not eat local fruits or mushrooms because they can accumulate radiation. Of course, you cannot drink local water. The elevated background will remain there for hundreds, and possibly thousands, of years. In general, if you travel along authorized routes, the radiation dose per day will be within normal limits.

"But there are exceptions: Red forest, spent fuel storage facilities, burial grounds, etc. People are either not allowed to go to such places at all or are allowed to stay for a short time so as not to exceed the sanitary norm. If you go out in the sun on a summer day, nothing will happen to you in an hour. If you go out for 8 hours without sunscreen, you will get a burn. It's the same with radiation. It depends on how long you are in contact with it, how powerful it is, and how far you are from the source," explains the director of the Chornobyl Tour.

Сhildren were separated in classrooms. On attitude to liquidators and evacuees after Chornobyl disaster

Nowadays, the liquidators of the Chornobyl accident are remembered mainly on the anniversary of April 26. But it is important to support them all the time because they had to go through many difficult moments, says Kateryna Aslamova.

By the way, not all of their difficulties are caused by the accident. It is more about what they faced afterward. The explosion itself is a man-made accident. And the Chornobyl tragedy is all these psychosocial consequences that those who were involved in it later faced.

"They would come to hospitals with complaints, and they would be told: "What do you want, you were in Chornobyl". After the accident, evacuated children were often kept away from the classrooms because they were afraid of being infected by radiation, even though this never happened. In the first years after the accident, people even said: "I will not marry my daughter to him because he was a liquidator, they will have mutants." There was no psychological work with the liquidators and their families, no support. Payments were often meager," Yaroslav notes.

Tour inside the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, Chornobyl liquidator Serhii Myrnyi (photo: Yaroslav Yemelianenko)

The Chornobyl Tour began to involve liquidators in excursions as guests. At first, they were reluctant to agree, but with each new trip, they became interested when they saw people's reactions to their personal stories. For them, it became an opportunity to talk about themselves and talk about the painful things that had been going on for decades, which is one of the techniques of psychological recovery. And they saw that their work after the accident was not in vain.

"One liquidator said: "You can understand why I didn't want to go to Chornobyl again at first. I served there for a month, and when I came back and went to the social center, I was told: "You were not there, your military unit was disbanded." He had been begging at the doorsteps of government agencies for years, and nothing had changed. For 17 years, the man was severely deformed under the pressure of the situation, which did not let go, demanding fair recognition of his work. And it was this attitude towards many categories of participants after the accident that created a deep trauma," he recalls.

Oleksii Breus, the operator of Unit 4 and one of the liquidators, also went on tours to Chornobyl to tell people about those events, Kateryna says.

She remembers them leaving Kyiv and being introduced to him in the morning: "This is the person who came to the destroyed reactor on April 26 at 7 a.m." The group did not react in any way. But half a day passed, and they were already standing in front of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant, and then Oleksiy started talking. The tourists began to tug at each other and pay attention to him.

"And I see that the group is already beginning to realize who is standing in front of them. Because at this point, they already knew the chronology of the accident and understood what the plant workers could do to prevent much worse consequences. Here is ChNPP itself, here is the operator - the puzzle is complete. People immediately asked a lot of questions, thanked him, and expressed their support. The liquidator ceases to be an abstract faceless character for them and becomes a living person," she says.

Yaroslav Yemelianenko draws an analogy with the modern military. It is very important to communicate with them properly now to prevent alienation of civilians and defenders in society. It is equally important that the liquidators are remembered not only on the anniversary of the accident, and the military are remembered not only on some memorable dates.

Tourist information center of the Chornobyl zone before the full-scale war (photo: Yaroslav Yemelianenko)

Many people, he says, think in terms of labels. When they see a military man, they think of a template set: donations, PTCP, etc. And they think of a liquidator as some kind of accident.

But once, during an excursion to the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, liquidator Oleksii Breus said to one of the tourists: "Shake my hand. Right now, I am passing on to you the handshakes of Leonid Toptunov, the man who pressed the world-famous AZ-5 button, and Oleksandr Akimov, the shift supervisor who worked on the night of the accident, from 1986. They are no longer with us, but through me, you shook hands with these people."

"Tourists were fascinated by this story. And now they will not forget Oleksii Breus and Leonid Toptunov. Similarly, we must now take an interest in those who are defending us at the front, learn their personal stories, and remember them. The memory of the dead should not turn into indifference to the living," he emphasizes.