Tension is rising between Ukraine and Russia. The front passes close to the plant that was devastated in 1986, which Kiev wants to garrison: «It doesn’t matter if the region is contaminated, this too is Ukraine. And there are a thousand reasons why the Russians never set foot on it again “
FROM OUR SEND
Ivankiv (Chernobyl) – Guarding nowhere, in a forest of snow-covered birch and alder trees. To protect no one, near broken houses. To defend the most untouchable homeland: untouchable, yes, because it is better not to touch it at all. Under the inscription “Chernobyl Tours.Ua », after the roundabout of Ivankiv on the P02 road, between a yellow-blue egg-shaped monument and a yellow-black sign with an atomic propeller, two Ukrainian soldiers puff steam and stop the cars. The finger is on the trigger. Further on, we do not go. Since December, the road has been closed. There is Belarus over there. And about ten kilometers earlier, the reactor. And a cordon of 75,000 soldiers patrolling 1,100 kilometers of the border, 145 square kilometers of the exclusion zone. And especially the post-atomic Pompeii that the world would like to forget, but no Ukrainian can ignore. «It does not matter whether it is a desert or a contaminated region», is the order of the Minister of Defense: «This is also Ukraine. And there are a thousand reasons why the Russians never set foot on it again ».
–
Dying for Chernobyl? Yet? Thirty-five years later, thyroid tumors and displaced people, Down babies and bifid thorns, radioactive deer and two-headed wild boars, acres of red woods and millions of infected with the worst of atomic leprosy. This is our first global environmental emergency. And the explosion that was 500 times more powerful than Hiroshima … Why die? Up to now we have lived a little, if nothing else. With visits at a safe distance from the famous 4-Lenin reactor. With the tristanzuolo museum on the outskirts of Kiev and the memorial to the victims of that April 26, 1986. With the Chernobyl Tour which every year attracted 100 thousand horror tourists, excited to wear special screens, to be measured with a geiger, to enter the places of the boom . All finished. The call to arms against the Russian invasion, if there ever will be, affects every corner of the country. This also: “Putin’s aggression can be as disaster as Chernobyl – warns Ukrainian ambassador to London, Vadym Prystalko -. After France, we are the second country for nuclear power plants: if something happens, I would like us to remember Chernobyl. And of the fact that we would fight to the death… ».
–
The most senseless of battles. As it happens, Chernobyl means “black grass”: today only a few madmen manage to enter the forbidden area who sneaks into the devastated houses of Prypiat at night, a few kilometers from the reactor, and steals contaminated souvenirs, radioactive metals, sell online. It will be impossible to stay on the black grass for the next three thousand years. In 2016, paid for by the Americans and 45 countries, the concrete sarcophagus was reinforced from a billion dollars that had slowly corroded over the decades: it should last at least another century and prevent the residues of the radioactive core – liquid lava that burns at a thousand degrees and could kill anyone who is exposed to it for more than five minutes – break through the air or sink into the aquifers. Chernobyl remains an indispensable symbol of Soviet disasters: covered by plants and miraculously repopulated by animals, the Ukrainians have asked Unesco to declare it a World Heritage Site.
–
And not only for its environmental rebirth: the destroyed power plant is the finger perennially pointed at Moscow. No one in the Kremlin – other than the Chinese with Covid – ever took responsibility for the censorships imposed at the time. Not even Gorbachev, who was secretary of the PCUS. In 2009, the secret documents of the Politburo were published in the US: an impressive amount of cover-ups and adjustments to reality.
–
Why would such a place be of interest to Russians? Rather than digging trenches, they say in Kiev, walls should be raised: “From Belarus, their friend Lukashenko plans to flood us with Syrian migrants, as he did on the Polish border.” In February, Lukashenko and Putin staged joint military exercises just across the Chernobyl border. Black grass never dies.
–
January 23, 2022 (change January 23, 2022 | 23:19)
© REPRODUCTION RESERVED
–
—
