Darwin Award Winners: Russian Soldiers that Occupied Chernobyl early in the War

Russian soldiers invading Ukraine in Feb. 2022 ignored station worker warnings to avoid terrain contaminated by radiation from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant accident, and hundreds of them lived for more than a month in trenches dug into ground saturated with potentially lethal isotopes, eyewitnesses and nuclear scientists said.

Valeriy Semenov, Security Chief at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant from Feb. 23 - April 3, 2022, in an interview with the Kyiv Post said Russian troops entering the premises showed little interest in research compiled over almost two decades on fallout and hot spot sites around the station.

Chornobyl’s reactor No. 4 exploded, caught on fire, and dumped catastrophic volumes of radioactive dust into the land around it and into the atmosphere following an April 26, 1986, failed maximum power test.

It was the worst nuclear power accident in history.

Russian aircraft, in the first hours of the Kremlin’s Feb. 24, 2022 invasion of Ukraine, ignored longstanding no-fly rules into air space above the plant. [Furthermore,] Russian armored columns used roads cutting straight across a 2,500 kilometer-square (1,553 mile-square) exclusion zone rigged with barbed wire fences and radiation warning signs.

“Subsequently, Russian aircraft began flying, passing just 30 meters [98 feet] above the station. They traversed over the power unit, including the reactor that was destroyed in 1986,” Semenov said.

“Despite nuclear power plants being deemed closed zones under international law, with overflights of any aircraft prohibited, they disregarded these regulations.”