THE CHERNOBYL EXCLUSION ZONE — The world's worst nuclear disaster, occurring just a few miles away, did not force 74-year-old Halyna Voloshyna to leave her home in Chernobyl in 1986.
So when marauding Russian soldiers showed up on her doorstep a little over a year ago, Voloshyna wasn't about to let them scare her off, either.
Halyna Markevych, 82, and her husband, Evgen, 86, at their home in March inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
Photo by Emile Ducke For The New York Times
Instead, during the month that Russian forces occupied this contaminated patch of land known as the
Chernobyl Exclusion Zone,
Voloshyna became such a nuisance that they began calling her "the angry grandmother at the end of the road."
“They said they were here to free me,” he recalled.
“Free me of what?”
she asked herself before cursing them.
Voloshyna is one of 99
lifelong
residents still living in the area, an area that covers approximately 2,590 square kilometers of some of the most radioactive soil on the planet.
The disastrous meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant blanketed the region with
a hundred times more radiation
than was released by the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
Chernobyl was also one of the first territories Russian tanks traversed as they left Belarus in hopes of seizing Kiev, the Ukrainian capital some 120 kilometers to the south.
And it was one of the first places they were kicked out of, forced to retire at the end of March last year.
The abandoned city of Pripyat was founded to house the many skilled workers assigned to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
Photo Emile Ducke for The New York Times
Visiting the area a year later, past calamity and current tragedy meet in strange and fascinating ways.
The contamination of the land that caused the collapse of the Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, and which will continue for the next hundred years, exposed the dangers of a political culture based on lies.
It contributed to the
demise of the communist system
and the end of the
Soviet Union.
The invasion of Russia was justified with other lies from the Kremlin:
that the Ukrainian state was a myth and that the kyiv government was controlled by Nazis.
Soviet-era posters deteriorate in the abandoned city of Pripyat, which before the war had become an obscure tourist attraction for those drawn to post-apocalyptic desolation.
Photo by Emile Ducke For The New York Times
Now, with the cities of Ukraine flattened, the ruins at Chernobyl don't feel so otherworldly but rather sadly familiar.
Distant explosions caused by animals stepping on mines laid by the Russians are a reminder that this land of the past is a large part of the present.
The entrance to the city of Chernobyl in northern Ukraine.
Photo by Emile Ducke For The New York Times
The confinement building and the massive sarcophagus built to bury the remains of reactor number 4, where two huge explosions blew off the 2,000-tonne lid covering the burning core, have long served as an object lesson in what can happen when politics is allowed to interfere with the scientific work of producing energy by splitting the atom.
Now it's happening again.
The now sealed No. 4 reactor, which exploded in 1986. Photo by Emile Ducke For The New York Times
Russian forces in southern Ukraine are in control of Europe's largest nuclear power plant, and that facility in
Zaporizhia
has endured repeated shelling, raising fears of disaster there.
And in Chernobyl itself, Russian soldiers showed
reckless
behavior at the beginning of the war.
On the night in February 2022 that the Russians invaded Ukraine, there was a drastic increase in radiation levels, from two to eight times higher than usual, in different parts of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, said Serhiy Kirejev, the Ukrainian official responsible for environmental monitoring in that area.
“That was the moment when more than
5,000 Russian military vehicles
entered the area, drove on the land roads, and then the soldiers started digging trenches,” Kirejev said.
“They stirred up the radioactive dust that was in the top layer of the soil.”
For the small group of elderly residents who remain in the area, the Russian invasion and nuclear disaster are life-limiting catastrophes.
A sign warning of radiation next to the place where Russian forces dug trenches in the so-called Red Forest, one of the most radioactive areas in the exclusion zone.
Photo Emile Ducke for The New York Times
These recall both events down to the smallest detail.
Visitors are rare these days, but Voloshyna was brimming with energy as she laid out a variety of food for her visitors and drank a bottle of vodka laced with local herbs.
Three drinks, he said, was customary for visitors.
Before the collapse, Voloshyna said, Chernobyl was a city known for its great natural beauty.
At the time, she was 36 years old and the director of the local kindergarten when the night sky lit up before dawn on April 26, 1986.
In the days after the accident, he joined other residents to pour sand into sacks that were flown in by helicopters to be dropped at the reactor.
Evacuation orders came in May and eventually about 200,000 people were relocated, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, but Voloshyna was not among them.
He hid inside his home after police ordered the residents to leave, even as authorities sealed off his home from the outside.
Two men ice fish on the frozen surface of the Pripyat River, inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
Photo by Emile Ducke For The New York Times
The next day, he saw how the policemen shot all the dogs.
Then they cut off the electricity and water.
But Voloshyna was determined to stay in the house that her grandfather had built over half a century before, on the banks of the Pripyat River.
Unlike when the meltdown occurred, the danger from the Russians storming last winter was immediately apparent.
That night, a resident, Evgen Markevych, 86, wrote down his thoughts in his journal.
“The regret has arrived,” he wrote.
“They are shooting.
Putin is like Hitler.
Russian troops captured the Chernobyl nuclear station.
Voloshyna was determined to stay.
Halyna Voloshyna, 74, at her home in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in northern Ukraine.
Photo by Emile Ducke For The New York Times
“It was crazy,” he said.
"They went on for days: an onslaught of tanks, helicopters and all kinds of gunfire all the time."
One morning, he said, he heard the Russians yelling at a neighbor and ransacking his house.
She stormed out to face them.
“There were 15 of them with machine guns,” he said.
“I didn't let them into my house.
I started yelling at them."
Two days later, her neighbor warned Voloshyna that her two adult children were in danger.
One of them had previously served in the Ukrainian Army and would therefore be of particular interest to the Russians.
So, under cover of darkness, the two men crept down to the riverbank behind the house, loaded two bicycles onto two small motorboats, and were off.
They hid for more than a month.
A Ferris wheel in Pripyat, where an amusement park was scheduled to open on May 1, 1986. The nuclear catastrophe occurred at the end of April of that year.
Photo by Emile Ducke For The New York Times
“Only when the area was liberated by the Ukrainian armed forces were they able to return home,” he said.
The youngest of his sons soon set off again to join the army.
In the last few months he was fighting in Bakhmut.
Voloshyna wiped away a tear and said that she hoped to see him at home again one day.
c.2023 The New York Times Company
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