As Vladimir Putin limbered up for his winter 2022 invasion of Ukraine, he made a series of preposterous claims. Ukraine, he said, had all that it needed to produce and deliver nuclear bombs and it was Russia’s duty to go in and protect the world from these supposed weapons of mass destruction. Within days the Moscow press was trying to back up the president’s fibs: Ukraine was set to build a dirty bomb by enriching the irradiated materials stored at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. Suddenly it seemed as if one global catastrophe — the 1986 meltdown that is still regarded as the world’s worst nuclear disaster — was being dressed up to support a catastrophic military action that would turn Europe upside down.
The Ukrainian historian Serhii Plokhy brilliantly, crisply chronicles what happened next. The Russians crossed the Belarus border into Ukraine on the way to capture Kyiv. They took a shortcut via the exclusion zone, the irradiated area round Chernobyl. Most dashed ahead, eager to make it first in the liberation of the Ukrainian capital (didn’t happen). Some of the others found themselves in a hot zone without fully realising where they were.
No wonder. The Chernobyl accident was covered up in various ways in Soviet times, partly out of embarrassment (it formed part of the narrative that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union). It would not have made it into the textbooks of the invading motor rifle brigade from Buriata — ethnic Asians from the Russian far east —and those officers who knew enough to be worried about radiation were not going to share their concerns with their men.
Although wildlife has returned to the exclusion zone, you wouldn’t want to dig trenches there, yet that’s what the occupying Russians did in the so-called Red Forest, filling up sandbags with radioactive soil. The Soviet officers were similarly careless of their troops during the 1986 clean-up.
Although reactor No 4 — where the explosion occurred in 1986 — is covered by a huge concrete sarcophagus, there arestill staff at the Chernobyl plant in 2022. Though the other three reactors were shut in the following years, the plant needs constant management. The decommissioning process is still underway, spent fuel is still being cooled, radioactivity levels are constantly being measured. The Ukrainian technicians, effectively taken hostage by the Russian invaders, tried to educate the occupiers as they went about searching for a dirty bomb that did not exist.
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Plokhy is uniquely qualified to write this book, not just as an acute historian of Russo-Ukrainian relations, but also as the author of the prizewinning Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy. This new book, an extended and deeply informed piece of reportage, raises some fundamental questions about nuclear power plant safety in wartime.
How can the global nuclear watchdog, the avowedly neutral International Atomic Energy Agency, keep tabs on Russia, one of its members? The agency has no effective legal instruments that could stop aggressors from targeting nuclear sites. Military attacks on nuclear plants have potential for global disaster, yet when the Russian army moved on from Chernobyl to seize the functioning power station at Zaporizhia, there was barely a squeak of protest. Parts of Zaporizhia were mined and the Russians used the station to launch artillery and missile attacks on Ukrainian towns, knowing the Ukrainians could not risk striking back. It is still part of a battle zone.
When the Russians grabbed Chernobyl in the early days of the war they realised it could be run only with the help of the Ukrainian technicians. The staff stayed for more than a month, uncomfortably aware that they might later be presented by their countrymen as collaborators because of their broader sense of responsibility. They knew that you couldn’t play around with even a dormant monster like Chernobyl.
Out of this tense situation Plokhy draws a parable for intelligent opposition to occupation. One hero of his narrative is Valentyn Heiko, the 59-year-old foreman of the night shift. He started to work in the plant in 1987 and knew how to deal with emergencies. His first step as the Russians moved closer to the plant was to send home the 169 officers of the Ukrainian national guard. But they, like most of the crew, chose to stay.
The Russians arrived, pointed tanks at the administration block and demanded surrender. What they got was a strict but courteous read-out of the expected rules of behaviour. “You are not merely in an atomic power station, but also in a post-accident atomic station,” Heiko told them. His case was clear: weapons were prohibited in operational areas, there would be no access to the main damaged reactor, and only 15 soldiers were issued with passes to zones with nuclear waste.
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The effect: Heiko flipped the situation. The Russians had become hostages, held not by pointed guns, but by the sudden understanding of the radiation risks. Every day the Russian soldiers had to submit to medical and psychological tests. Soon enough, the results showed they were deteriorating quickly. “The Russian commanders realised that they and their men were sitting on an explosive nuclear barrel,” Plokhy writes.
When news got through to the plant of fighting between Russian soldiers and locals in the nearby city of Slavutych — where many of the workers at Chernobyl had families — the staff threatened the occupiers that they would down tools and bring on an ecological disaster. “We didn’t just sit idly by,” one of the staff said. “We threatened the Russian armed forces in every possible way — you will perish here because we’ll make you such a dirty bomb that you will never get out of here.” That was the power of the powerless.
As for Heiko, he turned the propaganda-driven fear of the Russians against them. He weaponised their angst. When Putin threatened the use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine, Heiko told the Russian occupiers: “We have nothing to lose. I promise you that you will slowly and certainly die here together with me.” He was ready, he said, to sabotage the station’s three allegedly still active reactors.
Over time, the Russian occupiers probably stopped believing the Kremlin propaganda about Ukraine’s nuclear plants being run by crazed Ukrainian ultra-nationalists. And they sensed that there was no dirty bomb being cooked up by the Ukrainian staff, but could they be certain? And could they count on the Russian leadership to respect the basic rules of conduct around safety in power stations?
The 1986 meltdown in Chernobyl and the attack on nuclear power stations in the war now tell us something about the exercise of Moscow’s power. Not just the works of Plokhy, but also the HBO miniseries Chernobyl has addressed the implications of the first incident: how reactors designed to produce nuclear weapons were imperfectly repurposed to generate electricity. And how Soviet secrecy was built into the system, blinding the doomed operators and leading to the spread of radiation clouds across Europe.
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The war in Ukraine is fed by propaganda lies, military ignorance, a disregard for human life and the Kremlin’s overbearing geopolitical ambition. Plokhy hits home in this stirring, elegantly told story when he says that nuclear power, as mishandled and manipulated by Putin, is solidifying its reputation as a terminator of human life and an agent of ecocide.
It becomes difficult to see nuclear energy as a way out of the climate change crisis unless reactors are protected from attack at time of war. We can’t always rely on people such as Heiko to talk our way out of trouble.
Chernobyl Roulette: A War Story by Serhii Plokhy (Allen Lane £25 pp240). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
