The Ukrainians gathered on Saturday to honor the victims and the cleaning of the teams of the largest nuclear disaster in history, Chernobyl, during a ceremony held in the northern city of Plexyat.
Playpyat, now a ghost town, previously served the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
The event, which marked the 39th anniversary of the 1986 disaster, brought together employees of the factory, colleagues of victims, survivors, their relatives and representatives of the government.
The participants laid flowers in the monument dedicated to “liquidators” – in other words, the civil and military personnel who were called to face the consequences – and observed a minute of silence.
During the ceremony, state prices and honorary distinctions were awarded to the liquidators of the Chernobyl disaster, as well as to the persons involved in the response to the consequences of the Russian UAV strike on February 14, 2025, which struck the vault of the new sure confinement.
As the kyiv Regional State Administration recalls, the Russian forces seized the Chernobyl area at the start of the large -scale invasion. Although the Ukrainian forces released the region in the spring of 2022, the nuclear threat has not disappeared.
Russian soldiers occupied the “exclusion zone” around the Chernobyl plant for more than five weeks, perhaps suffering from radiation poisoning.
During the meeting, Svitlana Grinchuk, Minister of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources of Ukraine, expressed his gratitude to those who remained at the factory during the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
“Today, I would also like to take advantage of this opportunity to thank the people who stayed at their workplace on February 24, 2022. Despite the danger, despite the fact that there was a direct threat for their lives and health, they ensured the functioning of the plant and essential companies to maintain radiotherapy not only for Ukraine but for the entire European continent,” she said.
According to official figures, 31 people died of the immediate effects of radiation after the 1986 disaster, and nearly 8.4 million people through Belarus, Russia and Ukraine were exposed to radiation.
The consequences are still impossible to assess – but we know that a huge radioactive cloud has gradually reached almost every corner of the earth. Today, 30 kilometers around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant remain an exclusion zone.
Editor • Lucy gave
