“Learned something again” podcast: That’s why the Ukrainian military is practicing in Chernobyl

Chernobyl is considered the largest civil nuclear power disaster. But the nuclear ruins are also on the shortest route to the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, should Russian troops invade from Belarus. But that’s not the only reason why Ukraine is holding military exercises there.

Russia denies planning an invasion of Ukraine. But the Ukrainian army wants to prepare for all possibilities and is already practicing house-to-house fighting – in Prypiat, the ghost town that is only four kilometers from the Chernobyl nuclear ruins.

There, in early February, Ukrainian soldiers accurately fired mortar shells, snipers took aim at wooden targets in the windows of the empty prefab buildings, national guardsmen secured the streets with armored vehicles, the allegedly wounded were brought to safety by their comrades – the Ukrainian army proudly presents itself in several videos Your skills. It was the first military exercise in the city since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, says Ukraine’s Interior Ministry.

“It’s our territory, our country”

On April 27, 1986, the residents of Pripyat had to leave the city in a hurry. About 24 hours earlier, reactor four at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded a few kilometers away. Then the Soviet leadership in Moscow ordered the evacuation of the 48,000-inhabitant city and set up a 30-kilometer exclusion zone around the radiant ruins. People left their belongings behind back then. As are their pets, who are later shot and buried.

To this day, Prypiat is deserted, a contemporary historical document like something out of a horror film. There is an abandoned fairground with a Ferris wheel, abandoned schools and kindergartens where the toys of the children who suddenly had to flee in the 1980s are still lying around. In the basement of the local hospital, the protective clothing of the firefighters who unsuspectingly went to Chernobyl to extinguish the reactor fire is still gathering dust. Now suddenly soldiers are fighting in the city.

“It doesn’t matter if the area is contaminated and nobody lives here,” a lieutenant colonel of the Ukrainian border guard said.New York Times‘ said. ‘It is our territory, our land, and we must defend it. As long as the soldiers are not in areas that are too heavily contaminated, there is no danger.”

Border tourist attraction

Experts agree. “From a radiological point of view, this is not dangerous,” explains Sven Dokter from the Society for Plant and Reactor Safety. “The radiation dose that you receive in Prypiat is said to be less than 0.005 millisieverts. That is significantly less than the dose that you receive when you are x-rayed at the dentist or when you fly from Germany to Ukraine and back by plane .”

Dokter has also visited Pripyat and Chernobyl, but unlike many other people for professional reasons. Before the Corona crisis, however, tens of thousands made a pilgrimage to the restricted area out of curiosity to take pictures of the ghost town and the huge sarcophagus that covers the nuclear power plant – quite legally, Ukrainian tour operators offer such excursions. This is harmless to health if you follow the rules, says nuclear expert Dokter.

At the moment, Chernobyl is not seen as a tourist attraction that brings a little money into the Ukrainian treasury, but also as a possible route for an invasion by Russian troops. In fact, it would be the quickest route to the Ukrainian capital should Russian troops actually invade from Belarus. Kiev is just under 70 kilometers from the exclusion zone and just over 80 kilometers from the Belarusian border. And that is exactly where Russia is currently conducting a huge military maneuver.

Invasion despite radiation hotspots?

For the maneuver, Russia has transferred thousands of troops and important weapon systems to Belarus, including anti-aircraft missiles and fighter jets. However, what exactly happened is unclear. Out of concern, the Baltic states within the framework of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) demanded that Belarus disclose this, Thomas Wiegold recently explained to ntv. The official announcement is that these troops will return to Russia on February 20th. The military expert and journalist emphasized that this should be observed, because the equipment for such an attack is on site.

According to the US, there are “clearly” more than 100,000 Russian troops in the entire Ukrainian border area. However, there now seems to be more arguments against than for a Russian invasion. On the one hand, Russia announced on Tuesday that it intends to withdraw some of the troops stationed south and west of the Ukrainian border. Another argument against an invasion from Belarus via Chernobyl is that the area is anything but well developed. Roots and branches restrict freedom of movement 33 years after the nuclear accident, as do swamps, moors and rivers in the vicinity. It is difficult enough to advance on foot, let alone in a tank, even the Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Resnikov said on the sidelines of the military exercise in Pripyat.

And even if a short visit to the region is not considered dangerous to health – it is not entirely harmless either. Before the Ukrainian army began its exercise, workers scoured the ghost town with Geiger counters to spot potential radiation hotspots. There are a few of these in the region, says nuclear expert Dokter. Irradiated or contaminated objects are often lying around, especially away from the few marked paths. So-called waste dumps are also slumbering there, rubbish graves in the ground, in which all kinds of debris were buried in the days and weeks after the reactor catastrophe.

Moscow lies icon

Apart from that, however, Pripyat, the inhospitable ghost town, is the ideal place to practice urban warfare. “There are no civilians,” a Ukrainian soldier told French news channel France24. “We can shoot real ammunition and get as close to reality as possible.”

But the region is also living proof of the failure of the Soviet Union. Chernobyl is considered the greatest catastrophe in civil nuclear power. The reactor explosion released about 400 times as much radiation as the American atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima. Hundreds of thousands of residents were forcibly relocated, thousands of animals and an unknown number of people were killed.

It is the place where the Soviet leadership in Moscow abandoned and lied to their fellow Ukrainians, and perhaps precisely because of this, it is the ideal symbol for a Ukrainian mobilization campaign.