On February 24th, 2022, a military convoy arrived at the Chernobyl power plant in northern Ukraine. Russian officers declared they had orders from Moscow to seize control and would act in line with those commands if they met any resistance. The Ukrainian National Guard commander instructed his men to lay down their weapons “so as not to endanger the site and avoid another nuclear disaster”. So began the 35-day occupation of the plant.
When General Mark A Milley briefed President Joe Biden on the Russian plan “to conduct a significant strategic attack on Ukraine”, he used a map that suggested the Russians would bypass the Chernobyl exclusion zone on their way to the capital Kyiv (194km to the south) because, as Serhii Plokhy puts it, “why would anyone of sound mind send troops into a nuclear disaster zone?”
This question hangs over Chernobyl Roulette, Ukrainian academic Plokhy’s second book on the infamous nuclear accident site after 2018′s Chernobyl: History Of A Tragedy. In his epilogue he offers an answer. “They did that to achieve their geostrategic goals while showing complete disregard for the health and lives of their soldiers, to say nothing of legal norms and their country’s international obligations.”
Despite the fact that Ukraine had joined the non-proliferation treaty as a non-nuclear state, Russian president Vladimir Putin justified his actions by claiming that the republic was preparing to produce nuclear weapons and stating, “we cannot fail to react to that real danger”.
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Valentyn Heiko, the night shift foreman, and his staff of technicians stayed at the plant despite the risk to both reputation and physical wellbeing, because they understood what was at stake, and slowly turned the tables on their oppressors, making it clear to them what “the real danger” actually was.
[ Thirty-eight years after Chernobyl, we are again on a nuclear knife-edgeOpens in new window ]
The success of the Ukrainian counteroffensive to the north forced a withdrawal some five weeks later, although Russian forces still control Europe’s largest nuclear power station at Zaporizhia in southern Ukraine. Plokhy’s gripping and unsettling account ends by questioning the effectiveness of an International Atomic Energy Agency that refused to even name Russia as an aggressor, much less demand their withdrawal, and warning that unless reactors are protected from wartime attack, the reputation of nuclear power as “a terminator of human life and an agent of ecocide” can only solidify.
