Revenge of the Red Forest

Svitlana CHORNA

27 квітня 2022 179

The first information about the ionizing radiation among the russian occupants appeared on Belarusian opposition-driven Telegram channels.

Burned vehicles not far from Dytiatky checkpoint, the main entrance to the Exclusion Zone

Nuclear terrorism, taking Chernobyl NPP staff members and residents of adjacent villages as hostages, as well as the acts of looting. Russian occupants controlled the premises of Chornobyl NPP for 36 days, threatening Ukraine and the whole world with a new man-made disaster.

They captured state-run enterprise «Chornobyl nuclear power plan» on February 24, on the first day of the undeclared war, coming from the territory of Belarus in huge convoys. The witnesses say that russian military vehicles entered the territory of Ukraine for six days in a row. After the occupation of Chornobyl zone, ruscists forced the staff to stay on their work places around the clock, and forbade them to enter the territory. They threatened to shoot those who disobeyed. Vasyl Andriyovych who tried to take his family from occupation to a safer place in Prybirsk village says that ruscists opened chaotic fire on residential houses and light-duty cars, while seven of his young fellow villagers were captured. Their fate is still unknown.

It was Chornobyl NPP that the occupants used as a safe zone to take cover in. They knew that the Armed Forces of Ukraine would not open fire at it. So they put their combat units in the hospital and the office buildings of the exclusion zone’s enterprises; there are eleven such enterprises. These combat units were marching towards Kyiv on the rotation basis. In the town of Chornobyl, russians set the temporary command post for the troops of the Eastern Military District and the command post of the 38th Detached Motorized Rifle Brigade. Several hundred meters away from the isolation buildings of the nuclear power plant, across the town of Pripyat, the occupants laid a transport corridor. Every day, they used it to deliver dozens of tons of rocket-propelled shells, artillery shells and mortar mines from the logistics base in Narovlyansky district of Gomel region in Belarus.

Having conducted the operation to capture Chornobyl NPP, the russian military leadership ordered its soldiers to set the firing positions at the station and beyond its premises. The occupants spent almost 30 days setting their positions and digging trenches in the famous Red Forest, where even stalkers take no chances. When the NPP’s power unit exploded in 1986, the soil in this area took the most of the radioactive dust emission. The high radiation dose destroyed all trees, mostly the pines in that area of almost 10 square kilometers, turning their color from green to red. One could see the dead trees glowing in the night. So it is dangerous to enter the Rusty Forest (or the Red Forest, as they call him) without protective suits.

However, the occupants made fire, cooked food and burned the grass, inhaling the radioactive smoke. They were amidst the area of temporary location of radioactive waste, where the red trees were cut down by bulldozers and buried in the ground. This is why the levels of radioactive contamination in that place are maximal. The fragments of irradiated nuclear fuel and graphite blocks that were tossed by the explosion all over the Red Forest are now lying at the depth of 40-80 cm under the ground. But the occupants dug deeper, taking more and more radiation damage. The exterior and interior irradiation, alpha and beta particles are now attacking the bodies of occupants from the inside, sentencing them to quick or delayed death. But it is imminent in both cases.

After the escape of the occupants, experts examined the areas that they abandoned. One of the indicators that shapes the interior irradiation suffered by the ruscists from the soil (beta contamination) made 90 Sr, which exceeds the normal level by 160 times. The radioactive background in the rooms where the occupants put the sand into bags and used them for protection of these rooms is ten times higher than the normal one.

The occupants took the damaged hardware from Chornobyl zone, and it was badly irradiated. So everyone who took this hardware, repaired it or accepted it as scrap metal took a significant dose of radiation, too.

The Red Forest avenged the murders of Putin’s thugs in Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel and Borodyanka, where they retreated to, coming from the Chornobyl exclusion zone, shelling the towns, raping and torturing people. This is their payback for the theft of the system of radiological monitoring, which gathered, processed and handed over the data about the radiation levels in the entire exclusion zone. This is how they pay for looting the offices and taking computer hardware, kettles, coffee makers, blankets, kitchenware, for taking all of this to their combat vehicles and coming back to russia. They destroyed whatever they could not take with them. That’s the price to pay for the destroyed Chornobyl archives that was collected for dozens of years - even for the downed monument of Lenin in the town of Chornobyl, which was a part of Chornobyl museum exhibition.

The first reports about radioactive contamination among the russian occupants appeared on Belarusian opposition-driven Telegram channels. According to these reports, ruscists who were suspected to have radiation disease symptoms were brought to Gomel in seven buses. Some Ukrainian experts assume that russia conducted a Szezhok-2 special operation in Chornobyl, which aimed to check the effects of radiation on its soldiers. On the other hand, as weird as it sounds, neither privates nor their generals have any clue about the Chornobyl disaster and its consequences. In an interview, Colonel General, Hero of Russia Vladimir claimed that all these talks about the radiation effects among the russian occupants in the Red Forest are pure lies. According to him, Soviet partisans “took these positions during the Great Patriotic War, and no one had any radiation disease”. Well, no comments here.