On the first day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, February 24, 2022, Moscow troops entered the highly radioactive exclusion zone surrounding Chernobyl through Belarus and occupied the site of the plant, which has not been operational since 2000. They remained there. a month before withdrawing looting, according to Kiev, scientific material.
Where is Chernobyl?
Chernobyl is located in the north of Ukraine, in the kyiv province, near the border with Belarus.
Nuclear power plant explosion: what happened at Chernobyl in short?
The Chernobyl accident was a nuclear event that occurred on April 26, 1986 at the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Nuclear Power Plant. It was the worst nuclear accident the world has ever known.
The incident occurred after the number four reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in what was then the Soviet Union during inadequate tests at low power resulted in a loss of control that caused an explosion and a fire that demolished the building of the reactor and released large amounts of radiation into the atmosphere.
As safety measures were ignored, the uranium fuel in the reactor overheated and melted through the protective barriers.
Hundreds of thousands of people were affected by radiation and some 350,000 had to leave their homes in highly contaminated areas.
For 10 days, the nuclear fuel burned, releasing radioactive elements into the atmosphere that contaminated, by some estimates, up to three-quarters of Europe, especially the then-Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.
The USSR authorities tried to hide this accident. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev did not speak publicly until May 14.
Since 1986, the UN has contributed to meeting the needs of the population in the areas surrounding Chernobyl, first with emergency and humanitarian aid, and later with support for recovery and social and economic development, through the teams of Nations in countries working with civil society, international partners and donors.