How Chernobyl Workers Defeated the Russian Army

When Russia’s All-Out Invasion of Ukraine Beginssoldiers entered the country by crossing the northern border from Belarus. Their goal was set to capture Kievabout 60 miles south.

However, standing between them and the capital were the ruins of Chernobyl nuclear power plant and the exclusion zone around it, a 1,000-square-mile area severely restricted due to radiation poisoning. Undeterred, Russian forces entered and captured the decommissioned factory on the first day of the invasion. Five weeks later, even as the horrors of war rages across Ukraine, Russian forces leave the factory.

Since the plant’s No. 4 reactor exploded in April 1986—to this day, the worst nuclear power accident the world has ever seen—the site has been occupied by generations of workers. meticulously managed to minimize the ongoing threat this area poses to the public. Their vital work could not be stopped when Russian tanks and troops arrived on February 24, 2022.

A new film featuring workers’ testimonies tells how they used their expertise and manipulation against the Russian occupiers until the last soldiers were forced to leave.

“Never in history has a nuclear power plant been taken over by a hostile army. This is unprecedented,” Oleksiy Radynski, a documentary filmmaker in Kiev, told The Daily Beast. “And also, nobody is prepared for this because everyone assumes everyone is a little civilized and you don’t do this. You don’t do something that could really lead to a global disaster of unwritten proportions. But the Russians did it.”

Oleksiy Radynski

Radinski is part of Calculation project, a group of journalists and researchers documenting Russian war crimes in Ukraine to build the evidence base for later prosecutions. One such war crime is the occupation of Chernobyl, which Radynski explored through the testimony of people forced to work and live with Russian forces as they moved in and shocked the world by turn this site into a military base. He also made a documentary, Chernobyl 22uses footage from interviews conducted after the occupation of the plant ended on March 31, 2022.

Radynski’s connection to the region is personal, he was one of tens of thousands of children evacuated from Kiev after a factory disaster 37 years ago when he was just two years old. The crisis, created by human error, and its aftermath is one of Radynski’s earliest childhood memories. It was inconceivable, he said, that the security of Chernobyl would be threatened by a military operation of any kind, until the moment it happened.

“They have security protocols in place for any kind of disaster, such as natural disasters or terrorist attacks, but not for an invading army with tanks and heavy artillery, etc.,” Radynski said of factory workers. “So they have to improvise. I think they did something really, really great. The determination of these people is also beyond imagination.”

The plant’s arrest immediately sparked international condemnation and concern. Those fears were exacerbated when factory monitoring stations recorded a radiation spike on the day the Russian forces arrived when military vehicles disturbed the contaminated soil as they plowed through the exclusion zone. The risks are real. But Ukrainian workers realized they could use the fear of those risks to their advantage, Radynski said, by exacerbating radiation fears among Russian commanders.

“What the Ukrainian employees at the factory – I mean the senior staff – did, was they said: ‘If you want to survive, this place is dangerous,'” says Radynski. If you think you have taken over the nuclear power plant then you are wrong.This is not actually a nuclear power plant, this is a nuclear plant that has been shut down and after the disaster.It is a complete thing. It’s completely different and if you want to survive here, you have to obey Ukrainian laws on radiation safety.’”

“This is of course true, but it’s also a bit manipulative, because along with these basic radiation safety rules, they also started imposing on the Russians,” says Radynski. In one incident, on 9 March, the factory lost power due to damaged power lines in fighting elsewhere. Workers at the plant persuaded the Russians to fuel diesel generators, arguing that a complete power outage could lead to dire consequences. Oleksiy Shelestiy, the plant’s supervisory electrician, said in the Radynski film that the employees joked among themselves that, in their own way, they were helping the Ukrainian armed forces by transferring tons of fuel. Go to Chernobyl and stay away from the Russian tanks.

Oleksiy Radynski

However, the day-to-day reality for those who had to continue working in the decommissioned factory during the occupation remained dangerous and exhausting. “They don’t have a good night’s sleep,” says Radynski. “They were not given proper rest. They were completely exhausted – they could make mistakes of any kind at any time. They might be doing something wrong at the factory. So this is also extremely dangerous. Some of them even spent more than 25 days working non-stop there.”

When they can sleep, many have to do so in the same area as the Russians. Of course, the dangerous situation in Chernobyl also affected the invading army.

A particularly bizarre example of Russian recklessness during the occupation was where they chose to dig their fortifications. One of the sites is in the Red Forest – a wooded area near the plant named for the shade of its pines that were altered after being exposed to large amounts of radiation during the 1986 disaster. As part of the cleanup operation, the authorities decided to level the forest and bury the contaminated trees in the trenches.

DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP via Getty Images

“They dug fortifications in this area, where it’s really not a forest but a forest that’s under the ground,” says Radynski. “The most contaminated materials are below ground. So you really shouldn’t walk there, but one thing you definitely shouldn’t do is dig there.”

In his interviews, Radynski said that he learned that this extremely dangerous decision could not have simply been caused by Russian commanders being negligent with regard to the health of their own soldiers. “When the Russian generals took over the factory, they bragged to the staff that they knew their factory very well because in Russia they had an identical factory,” says Radynski.

That twin plant, Radynski said, is the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant in western Russia — a Soviet plant built in the 1970s that is structurally so similar to Chernobyl that it is used as a fuel plant. fulcrum for his Ukrainian double factory as a filming location.

“They say they are planning and rehearsing the takeover of the nuclear power plant in Kursk,” Radynski said of the Russian commanders. “But of course there’s one thing they probably didn’t take into account—that the power plant in Kursk is actually identical in every way with one exception: it’s not contaminated.”

The extent of damage to Russian soldiers from exposure to potentially dangerous doses of radiation remains unclear. Report claimed some needed treatment for radiation sickness in Belarus, while a witness in the documentary claimed that workers saw Russian men “evacuated on buses full of people.” vomiting”. Another said Chernobyl chefs had to warn the Russians who shot and skinned an elk that eating the animal – where the wildlife grazes on contaminated animals – could be a bad idea.

Oleksiy Radynski

When the Russians withdrew, the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine quote losses inflicted by their armed forces and “radiation exposure” were the main reasons for their retreat, taking the opportunity to mock the Russian “mutants” on their way to retreat.

However, the occupation had serious consequences for the ongoing safety of Chernobyl. When the Russians left, a great deal of property was destroyed or stolen—a estimate alleged that about $1 million in property was looted—including everything from technical equipment to teapots. “Fortunately, a lot of really important equipment is too big to fit into a tank or military bus,” says Radynski. The area has also been heavily exploited, a fraction of the national scourge report saw an area the size of Florida in Ukraine contaminated with explosives.

Arguably the most worrisome consequence for workers, says Radynski, is the ever-present feeling of insecurity that accompanies fear that the Russians might return. Once unthinkable, the cavalier attitude towards nuclear safety in Ukraine has remained unchanged since the occupation of Chernobyl. On Thursday, Ukrainian emergency workers even join the exercise to prepare for a possible radioactive leak at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant—the largest in Europe— amid alarming reports that Moscow is preparing such a plot at the site This. Like Chernobyl, the Zaporizhzhia plant in the southwest was occupied by Russian forces early in the war—but the occupiers still control it to this day.

For Radynski, the return of the Chernobyl plant to Ukraine’s control is in itself a remarkable testament to the courage of the workers who persevered in carrying out their duties in the face of immense danger. song. “There have been many stories of Russian military failures in this war – I hope there will be many more,” he said. “But most of the stories of Russian failures that we know of come from the Ukrainian Army.”

However, in this case, it was the Ukrainian workers who won. The Russians at Chernobyl “were defeated by the might of Ukraine’s kafkaesque bureaucracy,” says Radynski, as employees figured out how to “swallow them into this kind of radiation protocol swamp.” He noted that the protocols they didn’t follow.

In the documentary, a physical protection engineer at Chernobyl describes an exchange with a Russian energy official who keeps an eye on the plant’s employees for fear they might intentionally cause some kind of disaster. nuclear disaster. “‘I don’t care about your armed thugs,'” Vitaliy Popov said he told the officer. here to prevent 1986 from happening again.’ I told him: ‘I will fulfill my duty.’”