VYSCHETARASIVKA: Anastasia Rudenko won her late husband a brilliant gold medal Victor honored to work in chernobyl nuclear disaster zone.
She died of bladder cancer in 2014—probably the result of radiation, she thinks. Now she mourns her loss in the Ukrainian village of Vyschetarasivka, across the river, the . From zapsorizia nuclear power plants.
Kyiv and Moscow accused each other of shelling near the facility. Rockets have struck a radioactive waste storage area and monitors have warned of a “serious” crisis with the potential for a catastrophic fall.
Across the 14-kilometre (nine-mile) Dnipro River, the station’s hulking silhouette is clearly visible from the village where Rudenko handles the paperwork proving her partner’s fatal role in history’s greatest nuclear disaster. Is.
“We could be of the same fate as the people of Chernobyl,” the 63-year-old told AFP.
“There is nothing good in what is happening, and we don’t know how it will end.”
Ukraine The Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe of 1986 has been deeply troubling, when a Soviet-era reactor exploded and emitted radiation into the atmosphere in the country’s north.
Russia occupied the site when it launched a massive invasion of Ukraine in late February, sparking security fears, but it was abandoned within weeks when Moscow failed to take Kyiv.
The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine was also occupied in the early days of the war, but it has remained in Russian hands ever since.
Ukraine says enemy forces are launching attacks from the facility – Europe’s largest – and that its own forces cannot retaliate.
The escalating situation for those with close ties to Chernobyl draws deep echoes from the past.
Anastasia’s husband Victor worked as one of 600,000 “liquidators”, painstakingly decontaminating the “Chernobyl Exclusion Zone”, where high radiation levels forced civilian evacuations.
The official death toll in Chernobyl is just 31, although that figure is hotly contested, with some estimating that thousands of liquidators may have suffered lethal doses of invisible rays.
Victor drove a truck in the “Zone” for a total of 18 days. A gold service ribbon provided by the Chernobyl Federation of Ukraine shows atoms revolving around the “Bell of Chernobyl”, a symbol that has become a ringing reminder of the event.
A brittle document from the archives of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine attests to Victor’s work and the dose of radiation absorbed by him – 24.80 Roentgen.
“When I look at my husband’s papers, I feel pain,” Anastasia explained. “Many people were killed or permanently injured.”
“We can see it very well when the Zaporizhzhya plant is being shelled,” he said. “People are rumored to be leaking something, but they avoid publicly admitting it.”
Vasil Davydov says that three “liquidators” are still living in the village of Vyshetrasivka, a bucolic collection of garden-side bungalows with a hazy view of the Zaporizhzhya Plant’s six reactors and twin cooling towers.
He’s one of them. He spent three and a half months working on the Chernobyl decontamination, operating a cracking dosimeter to measure radiation levels with 102 trips in the “zone” and knocking down tainted houses to the ground.
In his garden, the 65-year-old opens his own service medallions on a refrigerator lying by its side, which is used as a makeshift table. Shows the figure of an atlas holding a globe, the image of a globe replaced by the Chernobyl plant.
There are pictures too. Davydov as a handsome uniformed soldier, accompanying comrades and in front of a patriotic sign proclaiming: “Soldier! We will revive life in the Chernobyl plain.”
“There I was. I saw it all, and I saw the scale,” he said.
According to Davydov, Russian soldiers handed over in case of emergency to the village, to prevent a certain type of radiation, just a few days after taking iodine tablets at the plant.
But it seems that his time working in the “Zone” has filled him with the fear of being in front of the Zaporizhzhya plant, even in a moment of crisis.
“If you believe everything, you can go crazy,” he said. “So you filter everything through your experience.”
“What will my fear do?” He asked. “How can this help me?”
She died of bladder cancer in 2014—probably the result of radiation, she thinks. Now she mourns her loss in the Ukrainian village of Vyschetarasivka, across the river, the . From zapsorizia nuclear power plants.
Kyiv and Moscow accused each other of shelling near the facility. Rockets have struck a radioactive waste storage area and monitors have warned of a “serious” crisis with the potential for a catastrophic fall.
Across the 14-kilometre (nine-mile) Dnipro River, the station’s hulking silhouette is clearly visible from the village where Rudenko handles the paperwork proving her partner’s fatal role in history’s greatest nuclear disaster. Is.
“We could be of the same fate as the people of Chernobyl,” the 63-year-old told AFP.
“There is nothing good in what is happening, and we don’t know how it will end.”
Ukraine The Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe of 1986 has been deeply troubling, when a Soviet-era reactor exploded and emitted radiation into the atmosphere in the country’s north.
Russia occupied the site when it launched a massive invasion of Ukraine in late February, sparking security fears, but it was abandoned within weeks when Moscow failed to take Kyiv.
The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine was also occupied in the early days of the war, but it has remained in Russian hands ever since.
Ukraine says enemy forces are launching attacks from the facility – Europe’s largest – and that its own forces cannot retaliate.
The escalating situation for those with close ties to Chernobyl draws deep echoes from the past.
Anastasia’s husband Victor worked as one of 600,000 “liquidators”, painstakingly decontaminating the “Chernobyl Exclusion Zone”, where high radiation levels forced civilian evacuations.
The official death toll in Chernobyl is just 31, although that figure is hotly contested, with some estimating that thousands of liquidators may have suffered lethal doses of invisible rays.
Victor drove a truck in the “Zone” for a total of 18 days. A gold service ribbon provided by the Chernobyl Federation of Ukraine shows atoms revolving around the “Bell of Chernobyl”, a symbol that has become a ringing reminder of the event.
A brittle document from the archives of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine attests to Victor’s work and the dose of radiation absorbed by him – 24.80 Roentgen.
“When I look at my husband’s papers, I feel pain,” Anastasia explained. “Many people were killed or permanently injured.”
“We can see it very well when the Zaporizhzhya plant is being shelled,” he said. “People are rumored to be leaking something, but they avoid publicly admitting it.”
Vasil Davydov says that three “liquidators” are still living in the village of Vyshetrasivka, a bucolic collection of garden-side bungalows with a hazy view of the Zaporizhzhya Plant’s six reactors and twin cooling towers.
He’s one of them. He spent three and a half months working on the Chernobyl decontamination, operating a cracking dosimeter to measure radiation levels with 102 trips in the “zone” and knocking down tainted houses to the ground.
In his garden, the 65-year-old opens his own service medallions on a refrigerator lying by its side, which is used as a makeshift table. Shows the figure of an atlas holding a globe, the image of a globe replaced by the Chernobyl plant.
There are pictures too. Davydov as a handsome uniformed soldier, accompanying comrades and in front of a patriotic sign proclaiming: “Soldier! We will revive life in the Chernobyl plain.”
“There I was. I saw it all, and I saw the scale,” he said.
According to Davydov, Russian soldiers handed over in case of emergency to the village, to prevent a certain type of radiation, just a few days after taking iodine tablets at the plant.
But it seems that his time working in the “Zone” has filled him with the fear of being in front of the Zaporizhzhya plant, even in a moment of crisis.
“If you believe everything, you can go crazy,” he said. “So you filter everything through your experience.”
“What will my fear do?” He asked. “How can this help me?”