Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, he asked himself why soldiers would steal electric kettles, but leave behind the base plates needed to power them?“What for,” wondered Toporovsky, dressed in army greens with long sleeves, a precaution against radiation.
A device that measured his accumulated exposure was clipped to his name tag.“Who needs kettles without an electrical connection?” The first 100 days of war through the eyes of a Ukrainian village Toporovsky was at his base in Slavutych, a city north of Kyiv built for survivors of the 1986 Chornobyl accident, when the Russian army crossed the border from Belarus on Feb.
24.Their tanks and armoured vehicles rumbled through the Red Forest, named after the pine trees that turned orangey-brown from radiation, to capture Chornobyl.As the Russians took control of the reactors and radioactive waste facilities, radiation measurements immediately climbed, which the International Atomic Energy Agency said was likely the result of military vehicles stirring up contaminated soil.Around the world, the word Chornobyl is synonymous with environmental catastrophe.
But the soldiers sent by Moscow behaved as if the nuclear disaster site was just another battlefield.To Toporovski, that said something about the state of President Vladimir Putin’s Russia.“It’s pedagogical,” he said.The Russians should have known they’d been sent to seize a zone that would give them a year’s worth of radiation exposure in a week.“And they dug a lot of trenches there,” Toporovsky said.He never sets foot in the Red Forest himself. “I am not a crazy person,” he explained.