Up until Russia's invasion of Ukraine, going to see the "monster" was relatively simple. As told in our reports (, promising e , promising) on site, visiting the former nuclear power plant and the exclusion zone was relatively easy: thanks to organized tours from government agencies that depart from Kiev, with an hour by bus it was possible to visit the entire area, including the abundant city of Prypyat, the exterior of the plant and thehuge Duga military antenna, once very secret.
An extreme tourism (or niche or horror as it has been defined) only marginally exploited, brought hard currency to Ukraine, allowing to monetize an area that is otherwise forbidden to everyone and any human activity. All of this suddenly ended with the invasion of Russia that started just over a year ago. One of the first objectives of the Russian military was precisely to occupy the Chernobyl complex: the small town of the same name where the workers who deal with the decommissioning of the plant live, the plant itself and the access roads to the forbidden zone had become areas occupied by the Red Army.
The goal of the former power plant was particularly easy: the 30 km no-go zone around the power plant is a huge area where there are no more civil installations, with the exception of the power plant now closed to activity and indeed a few structures intended for workers. The Russians arrived from the north, from Belarus, which practically borders the Chernobyl area: troops and tanks arrived in an instant thanks to the Belarusian regime friend of Moscow, which allowed the use of its territory for the accumulation and passage of Russian troops and vehicles.
Chernobyl: after the Russian invasion, nothing more is known about the fatal plant
Since then, nothing has been heard of the situation at the former nuclear power plant and concerns about the possible harmful consequences of the invasion have begun to increase. In fact, even if the plant has been shut down for years, an enormous quantity of unapproachable radioactive material remains under the sarcophagus built a few years ago, and the presence of the invaders inside the plant could suggest sabotage operations or, worse, by bombing the sarcophagus itself. In April of last year the Kiev army reconquered the Kiev area and the whole area of the plant, securing the area, but what is the current situation and what were the consequences of the invasion?
In reality, very little news arrives: the area is closed to tourists and can only be visited by accredited journalists, but it is still a war zone where it is not possible to shoot or photograph freely. The news is therefore filtered by military censorship and in any case scarce and not easily verifiable. What is certain is that the Russians have done damage during their occupation: they have stolen material, from small things to containers of radioactive material. The Russians took prisoner the Ukrainian soldiers who were guarding the garrison and then began a long negotiation with the personnel who had to do normal maintenance. Second Valentine Geiko, manager of the plant, after a difficult negotiation the Russians left the task of carrying out routine operations to the Ukrainian personnel, however forcing the personnel to work very long shifts without the necessary spare parts. Valery Semenov, the site's security manager, said that the Russians, in addition to stealing everything they found (the account includes water boilers, cutlery, computers and cars), but above all entered the most dangerous areas without precautions.
In general, Russian personnel and Red Army soldiers, according to Semenov, knew very little about the site and asked questions clearly inspired by regime propaganda: where were the NATO weapons, the American biological weapons laboratories and why the Ukrainians did not help the Russians to find the extremists the Russians had come to hunt down. Probably, and that's the worst news, the Russians were not informed of the danger of the area and what precautions to take, some did not even know of the nuclear accident. In the interdiction zone it is forbidden to build or dig ditches, due to the danger of raising radioactive dust: this is also the major obstacle to reclaiming the area, the houses of the abandoned city and the pieces of the power plant left unfinished cannot even be removed, everything must remain abandoned leaving the task of demolition to the atmospheric agents. Some buildings in Prypyat are in danger and some have already collapsed, a sign however that the Soviet construction of the time was of poor quality. Even just passing hydraulic pipes is a problem, it is preferable not to bury the pipes and have them travel outside, possibly bypassing roads and buildings.
The Russian soldiers, perhaps unaware of all this, roamed the various areas of the forbidden area with crawlers and heavy trucks, kicking up dust and causing the dispersion of earth and radioactive material with the tracks. Many soldiers moved in the "Red Forest", an area so called because at the time the trees had changed color due to radiation, without the necessary protections and even digging trenches and barracks.
Chernobyl: after the nuclear tragedy, radioactive ghosts remain the only inhabitants of the cursed area
The Russian soldiers have left at the end of March 2022, but the area is in any case insecure: apart from the trenches and the devastation caused by stealing hands down, it remains to be understood what dangerous was left by the invaders. Many areas were mined and the area was littered with anti-personnel traps, another legacy of the Soviet soldiers are fenced areas with barbed wire and a bridge in the exclusion zone blown up with explosives. It is not yet clear how dangerous the radioactive areas of the abandoned city are after the passage of the Russians.
To date, no one can predict when the area will be open to visitors again and Chernobyl will be even more of an abandoned and dangerous area in the future; to almost 40 years since the worst nuclear accident of the world, radioactive ghosts continue to be the only inhabitants of the cursed area.
