Anastasiya Rudenko clutches the shiny gold medal awarded to her late husband Viktor for his work in the Chernobyl nuclear disaster area.
He died of bladder cancer in 2014 — maybe a result of radiation, she thinks. Now she mourns his loss in the Ukrainian village of Vyschetarasivka, opposite the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant.
Kyiv and Moscow have accused each other of shelling near the plant. Rockets have hit a radioactive waste storage facility and monitors are warning of a “major” crisis with potentially catastrophic consequences.
Along a 14-kilometer stretch of the Dnipro River, the station’s massive silhouette is clearly visible from the village, where Rudenko is completing the paperwork proving her partner’s fateful role in history’s greatest nuclear disaster.
“We could meet the same fate as the people in Chernobyl,” the 63-year-old told the AFP news agency.
“There is nothing good about what is going on and we don’t know how it will end.”
– In the zone’ –
Ukraine remains scarred by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, when a Soviet-era reactor exploded, sending radiation into the atmosphere in the country’s north.
Russia seized the compound when it began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in late February, fueling security fears, but it was abandoned within weeks when Moscow failed to take Kyiv.
The Zaporizhia nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine was also occupied in the first days of the war, but has remained in Russian hands ever since.
Ukraine says enemy troops are launching attacks from the facility – Europe’s largest – and its own military is unable to return fire.
The escalating situation brings dark echoes from the past for those with close ties to Chernobyl.
Anastasiya’s husband Viktor worked as one of the 600,000 “liquidators” tasked with carefully decontaminating the “Chernobyl Exclusion Zone” where high levels of radiation were forcing civilian evacuations.
The official death toll from Chernobyl is still just 31, but that number is hotly disputed as some estimates say thousands of liquidators may have suffered fatal doses of the invisible rays.
Viktor drove a truck in “the zone” for a total of 18 days. A gold service ribbon, presented by the Ukraine Chernobyl Union, features atoms swirling around the “Chernobyl Bell,” a symbol that has become a ringing reminder of the event.
A fragile document from the archives of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry certifies Viktor’s work and the received radiation dose of 24.80 roentgens.
“When I see my husband’s papers, it hurts me,” Anastasiya explained. “Many people died or were permanently injured.”
“If the Zaporizhia plant is shelled, we can see it quite well,” she added. “People rumor that something is leaking, but they avoid admitting it publicly.”
– Living Liquidators –
Vasyl Davydov says three “liquidators” still live in the village of Vyshetarasivka, an idyllic cluster of garden-lined bungalows with a hazy view of the Zaporizhia Plant’s six reactors and twin cooling towers.
He’s one of them. He spent three and a half months working to decontaminate Chernobyl, making 102 trips to the “zone” where he operated a crackling dosimeter to measure radiation and leveled polluted homes.
In his garden, the 65-year-old packs his own service medals on a refrigerator lying on its side, which serves as a makeshift table. One shows the figure of Atlas holding the world, the image of a globe replaced by the Chernobyl facility.
There are also pictures. Von Davydov as a handsome uniformed soldier posing with comrades and in front of a patriotic sign that reads “Soldier! We will revive life on the Chernobyl site.”
“I was there. I’ve seen everything and I’ve seen the scales,” he said.
Just days after Russian troops took the plant, emergency iodine tablets were distributed around the village to block a certain type of radiation, Davydov said.
But his time in “the zone” seems to have accustomed him to the fear of living even in a moment of crisis vis-à-vis the Zaporizhia plant.
“If you believe anything, you can go insane,” he said. “So you filter everything through your experience.”
“What will my fear do?” he asked. “How can it help me?”
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