Chernobyl remembers the nuclear tragedy between nightmares due to the Russian occupation

The Ukrainian headquarters of Chernobylthe scene of the biggest nuclear accident in history 36 years ago, tries to overcome the trauma of the Russian military occupation in the midst of a conflict whose fighting continues to threaten the atomic facilities of Ukraine.

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“We still don’t have peace, the situation is not stable yet. We must be on alert,” said Rafael Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), during a visit to the plant.

If other years the anniversary of the catastrophe included ceremonies headed by the president, Volodymyr Zelensky, on this occasion the conflict has prevented any official act, although the Russian troops left the area a month ago.

“On February 24, the international community was once again convinced that totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union and now Russia are a threat to the world’s nuclear security,” the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

latent nuclear threat

That is why the visit of Grossi, head of the UN nuclear agency, whose secretary general, António Guterres, also visited Moscow today, was so important.

During the Russian occupation “nuclear safety was not normal and could have developed into an accident,” the Argentine diplomat noted.

Grossi arrived at Chernobyl accompanied by a team of experts and half a ton of nuclear measurement equipment to control the radioactive situation at the site and carry out “repair work”.

“Assistance (from the IAEA) will continue. This is only the first shipment of equipment, this is not a symbolic visit”, he assured, referring to the list of requests presented by kyiv to ensure the safe operation of its four nuclear plants.

That the threat is latent was made clear today, according to the Ukrainian nuclear agency (Energoatom), with the attacks perpetrated today near the Zaporizhia plant, the largest in Europe.

“The flight of the missiles at low altitude over the territory of the nuclear plant, where there are seven reactors with a large amount of nuclear material, creates a great risk. And it is that the missiles were able to reach one or several nuclear reactors, which threatens the whole world with causing a radioactive catastrophe”, denounced Petró Kotin, head of Energoatom.

The trauma of the occupation

Grossi took the opportunity to pay tribute to the plant workers held by Russian soldiers for 35 days, since thanks to their professionalism “the worst could be avoided”.

“They worked as if nothing had happened and kept the situation stable,” he said.

IAEA experts will also inspect the so-called “exclusion zone” around the plant, which the Russians occupied for more than a month after the surrender of Ukrainian soldiers.

“We have information about some (Russian) activities that took place there,” he said.

According to the Ukrainian authorities, the Russian soldiers, who entered the territory of the plant with tanks and trucks, looted several buildings, handled contaminated objects, created spills and deployed heavy weapons.

In addition, according to the images released by Ukraine, Russian soldiers dug trenches and cut down trees in the area known as the Red Forest, one of the areas with the highest levels of radioactivity on the planet, which experts consider enormous irresponsibility.

Levels of radioactivity much higher than the norm were detected in the buildings where the Russian military were installed and even in the sandbags.

Ukraine has turned to the international community to estimate the magnitude of the damage caused to the plant and determine responsibilities.

several atomic bombs

Former Soviet chemical troops officer Alexandr Logachov remembers “as if it were now” the four days he worked around Chernobyl in 1986.

“I still remember the liquidators illuminated at night as if they were fireflies due to radiation,” he told Efe.

He arrived hours after the accident. “Every hour that passed the radiation increased. On the day of the evacuation from Pripyat we detected 1.8 roentgen,” he explained.

“If an atomic bomb is a chain reaction, Chernobyl was like a bomb every second due to the steam leak from the fourth reactor that covered the city depending on the direction of the wind,” he explained.

In his opinion, what happened at the Fukushima plant (2011) shows that the world still has not corrected the “human factor”, since the construction of the plant in Soviet times included numerous irregularities. “You can say that the communist system exploded that same day,” he noted.

The same thing happened with the Russian occupation. “They are brainless. They don’t know the danger they put us in,” says Logachov, who lives in Hostomel, a town north of kyiv that was taken over by enemy troops.

“I had to enlist myself. Although it was very close to the airfield taken by the Russian paratroopers, my house was saved. Instead, many civilians died, ”she laments.

Source: Elcomercio

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