The presidents of Ukraine and Belarus, the two countries most affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, used the meltdown's 30-year anniversary on Tuesday to make political statements. It looks like neither of them — nor Russian President Vladimir Putin — has drawn the right conclusions from the tragedy, which probably hastened the Soviet Union's demise.
Unit 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant blew up on April 26, 1986, as its operators were testing a new generator. The explosion itself only killed one person, but its consequences were momentous: 116,000 people had to be resettled, 49 people died trying to mop up the fallout and the World Health Organization estimated the number of premature deaths at 4,000. The fallout made huge swaths of land in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia unsuitable for agriculture and rendered bodies of water too dangerous for swimming. Radiation levels are still higher than normal in many of these places, children are still born with deformities and cancer incidence is higher than in neighboring regions.
An area within a 30-km radius from the plant is still cordoned off in Ukraine, and only a few hundred people live in it at their own risk. I visited in 2012 and found an eerie, gloomy land in which trees and wild animals had taken over a thoroughly Soviet realm abandoned by its inhabitants. There was also a thriving illicit scrap-metal business, which provided an unofficial income to many of the people working in the "zone," as it is locally known. Judging by more recent reports, nothing much has changed since the Ukrainian revolution of 2014.