Chernobyl - Russian soldiers dug trenches in the dirt of one of the most radioactive places in the world. Ukrainian officials are concerned that they have, in fact, dug their own graves, reports an AP story from the site of the largest environmental disaster in the history of nuclear power in 1986.
Thousands of tanks and soldiers rumbled through Chernobyl's forested "exclusion zone" in the first hours of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, stirring up highly contaminated soil at the site of a catastrophic nuclear power plant explosion 36 years ago.
For more than a month, some Russian soldiers have been lying in the ground near a massive structure built to contain radiation from a damaged nuclear reactor. A careful inspection of their trenches was impossible, for even walking on the ground was not entirely safe.
As the 36th anniversary of this disaster approaches and the Russian invasion continues, it is clear that Chernobyl - a relic of the Cold War - was never prepared for this.
As scientists and others looked on in disbelief, Russian forces flew over the long-shuttered factory, ignoring the restricted airspace around it - targeting personnel still working at the factory, with employees sleeping on desks and eating only two times a day, adds AP.
"Even now (weeks after the Russians left) it takes me a while to calm down," the plant's chief security engineer Valery Semenov told AP.
He worked 35 days straight, slept only three hours a night and stayed even after the Russians allowed a shift.
"I was afraid that they would install something and damage the system," Syemenov added.
According to the AP, workers kept the Russians away from the most dangerous areas, but, Semenov said, in the worst situation he had seen in his 30 years at Chernobyl, the power plant was without power and relied on diesel generators to support critical water-circulating operations. for cooling.
"It was very dangerous to act this way," said Maksim Shevchuk, deputy head of the state agency that manages the exclusion zone.
Seizing a nuclear power plant for the first time is part of a nation's war strategy, said Rebecca Harms, former president of the Greens group in the European Parliament, who has visited Chernobyl several times.
She called it a "nightmare" scenario in which "any nuclear power plant can be used as a pre-installed nuclear bomb."
This visit, according to AP, risked a disaster worse than the initial explosion and fire in Chernobyl, which sent radioactive material into the atmosphere and became a symbol of the Soviet Union's last years of decline.
The international community, including Russia, has spent billions of dollars to stabilize and secure the area.
Now the authorities together with the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense are working on ways to protect the most critical places in Chernobyl. At the top of the list are anti-drone systems and anti-tank barriers, along with a system to protect against warplanes and helicopters.
None of that will matter if Russian President Vladimir Putin resorts to nuclear weapons, which Shevchuk can no longer rule out.
"I realized they could use any weapon and they could do any terrible thing," he said.
Rebecca Harms added that Chernobyl needs special international protection with a strong UN mandate.
As with the 1986 disaster, risks exist not only for Ukraine, but also for nearby Belarus and beyond.
"It depends on which way the wind is blowing," she said.
Having once watched thousands of Soviet soldiers work to contain the aftermath of the 1986 disaster, sometimes without protection, Harmsova and many others were shocked by Russian soldiers' disregard for security, or their ignorance.
Some soldiers even stole highly radioactive materials as souvenirs or possibly for sale.
"I think they have an imagination from the movies that all the dangerous little things are very valuable," Sevcak said.
He believes that hundreds or thousands of soldiers compromised their health, probably without any idea of the consequences, despite warnings from factory workers to their superiors.
"Most of the soldiers were around 20 years old," he said. "All these actions prove that for their superiors, and in Russia in general, human life is equal to zero".
The full extent of Russian activities in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is still unknown, especially as troops have been laying mines that the Ukrainian military is still searching for. They detonated some, further disturbing the radioactive soil. The Russians also started several forest fires, which were extinguished.
Ukrainian authorities are unable to monitor radiation levels across the zone because Russian soldiers stole the system's main server, cutting it off on March 2, the AP explains.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said on Saturday that it was not yet receiving remote data from its monitoring systems.
In normal times, about 6.000 people work in the zone, half of them in the nuclear plant. When the Russians invaded, most workers were told to evacuate immediately - now about 100 remain at the nuclear plant.
Semenov recalled that the Russians checked the remaining workers "for radicals."
We told them: "Look at our documents, 90 percent of us are of Russian origin, but we are patriots of our country."
When the Russians 31. hurriedly left this area in March as part of their withdrawal from the region, they took more than 150 members of the Ukrainian National Guard with them to Belarus. Shevchuk is afraid that they are now in Russia.
The Russians then gave the managers of the nuclear power plant a "choice" - to sign a document saying the soldiers had protected the site and there had been no complaints, or to be taken to Belarus.
The managers signed the document.
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