Knowing the horrific consequences of the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine, Kremlin leaders should be extremely careful about dealing with nuclear facilities and weapons.
Instead, President Vladimir Putin and his circle have treated nuclear power plants as just another tool in their campaign to destroy Ukraine and rebuild the empire of Peter I, Catherine II and Joseph Stalin.
In the 38 years since the Chernobyl explosion, some have become complacent about the risks of nuclear power. Not so Serhii Plokhy, Director of Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute. As he writes in his latest book on nuclear issues, the Kremlin’s war has involved high-risk roulette at the Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plants since the earliest days of the full-scale invasion.
The saddest person I have ever met was a 55-year old physician from Belarus, who had been treating children and teenagers maimed by the poisons released in the 1986 disaster.
The Chernobyl accident created a sub-population living under constant threat for the rest of their lives. An established consequence of the 1986 accident, for example, was an increase in thyroid cancer in young people, particularly children who were in utero or up to two years-old at the time of exposure.
Rates of acute lymphoblastic leukemia for males and females in the exposed Oblast were more than three times greater than those in unexposed regions.
In the early 1990s, I translated for some of the young victims of Chernobyl after charities helped them to vacation with families in the US and receive specialized hospital treatment. They were from Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia, but all understood Russian. After their long flight across the Atlantic, many of their faces showed fatigue and pain.
At the start of the full-scale invasion of 2022, Russian troops marched through the irradiated soil of the Nuclear Exclusion Zone that surrounds the locked-down Chernobyl plant in their failed quest to reach Kyiv. Soldiers even dug trenches in the poisonous soil.
They surrounded the plant and kept Ukrainian technicians inside as captives for 35 days, until the soldiers retreated north alongside other Russian forces driven back from the gates of Ukraine’s capital.
The Chernobyl plant has not produced electricity since the last reactor was shut down in December 2000, but spent nuclear fuel is still cooled at the site. Although the reactors have all ceased generation, Kyiv has maintained a large workforce at the plant because the decommissioning process requires constant management.
Ukraine still has three working nuclear plants, but the plant at Zaporizhzhia (“beyond the rapids” of the Dnipro River), the largest in Europe, has not produced electricity since it came under Russian control in March 2022. The plant is mostly shut down and all six reactors have been put in cold shutdown.
On September 11, 2022 the last operating reactor at the site was disconnected from the power grid. Shortly afterwards, a back-up power line was restored, allowing for an external electricity supply to enable the cooling and transition to the “cold stop” state.
The situation became more dire in June 2023 when the Russians blew up a section of the Kakhovka Dam, emptying the reservoir and threatening the nuclear station’s cooling pond. In 2024, an external radiation monitoring station 16km (10 miles) from the plant was destroyed by shelling and fire.
The plant is still surrounded by Russian forces but maintained by thousands of Ukrainian technicians kept inside like captives. The number of employees at the plant is reported to be around 3,000 — down from some 10,000 before the conflict.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has repeatedly called on Russia to halt all action at or against nuclear facilities, but these are ignored. Zaporizhzhia is in danger from frequent shelling in the area and the lack of experienced operators,
The fates of the Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia plants reveal the careless behavior of Russian officials and their indifference to human life. Another disaster like Chernobyl would again imperil Belarus and much of Europe as well as Ukraine and parts of Russia.
Putin’s threats to employ nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and against targets in NATO countries, may be bluffs, but the behavior of Russian authorities at Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia reinforces the image of idiotic sadism in the Kremlin and throughout its armed forces.
As Plokhy underscores, the IAEA has no way to enforce its appeals, the UN Security Council is paralyzed by great power vetoes and the UN General Assembly is weakened by the many delegations reluctant to anger their hoped-for benefactor in Moscow.
Meanwhile, most of the world sleeps and Western capitals focus on budget deficits and other issues far from Ukraine.
Walter Clemens is Associate, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University and Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science, Boston University, He wrote Blood Debts: What Putin and Xi Owe Their Victims (Washington DC: Westphalia Press, 2023).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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