Ukrainian officials said it was a Russian drone.
The Kremlin has called this a fabrication.
The situation is stable.
There’s radioactive dust around the shelter.
In some areas, when Russians retreated, theyleft behind horrific scenes.
The February drone attack is a reminder of how delicate the situation here remains.
One wrong move could trigger a catastrophe.
Officials at Chernobyl said that they were worried about the possibility of future attacks, given Russia’s unpredictability.
But on April 26, 1986,disaster struck.
The reactor meltdown killed 30 operators and first responders.
Last month, BI drove about two hours north of Kyiv to the exclusion zone.
At the entrance, a military checkpoint, armed guards scanned passports and inspected cars.
Several miles down the road, soldiers reviewed documents that granted visitors entry.
Three years earlier, it was a much different scene here.
Kireev recalled the day it happened and how a normal workday descended into chaos.
Details were scarce at the time.
He was toldthat a situation was unfolding and that after a week, everyone could return to work.
He left the exclusion zone later in the day, around noon.
“If we had known what it was, we would certainly have acted differently.
“We mainly took documents accounting records, personnel documents.”
A lot of important things were left behind.
Some of Kireev’s employees had decided to stay in the Chernobyl area.
The intel was then passed along to the Ukrainian military.
Informal intelligence networks like this have repeatedly proved invaluable to the defenders.
The Russian army left staff alone at first, Kireev said.
But it soon became stricter, confiscating phones and barring staff from gathering.
They startedlooting everything, from businesses to dormitories, and acting more recklessly around the exclusion zone.
Mutations occurred in animals and other living things in the wake of the catastrophe.
BI saw signs of that aftermath three years later.
It’s unclear how many of the fortifications existed before the war, but many are new.
One lot serves as a kind of graveyard for buses and cars destroyed by the Russians.
BI toured one of the laboratories that Russian troops occupied in 2022.
“Computers, office equipment, kettles were stolen.”
Russia explicitly denied striking the shield but has otherwise been largely silent on Chernobyl over the last three years.
The goal of the $2.2 billion structure is to prevent the spread of radioactive contamination.
It was impossible to miss from the road.
“The shelter is a structure that the whole world helped to build,” Kireev said.
“They covered that old sarcophagus.
It is designed to last for a hundred years.”
It’s Europe’s largest nuclear facility and near the front lines.
Kyiv and Moscow have accused each other of attacking the site, with Ukrainian officialsrecently expressing concernabout its safety.
“This is a terrorist threat to the entire world.”
