At 40 years since the Chornobyl disaster, Ukraine’s exclusion zone remains contaminated, restricted and newly militarised under the pressure of war.
Forty years after the Chornobyl nuclear disaster, Ukraine’s exclusion zone remains a place of layered danger: radioactive contamination in the ground, Russian drones and missiles overhead, and a small human presence that has never fully disappeared.
The Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, a restricted area of roughly 30km around the damaged plant, was created after the 1986 reactor explosion to limit the spread of radioactive material. It is still sealed off from ordinary public access, but scientists, soldiers and elderly returnees continue to live or work there, while wildlife has reclaimed much of the surrounding forest.
The anniversary comes as Russia’s full-scale war has added a new security dimension to a landscape already defined by risk. Russian forces briefly occupied the zone after the invasion began in February 2022, and Ukraine has accused Russia of firing drones into the area, including strikes that damaged the New Safe Confinement, the steel shelter built over the destroyed Unit 4 reactor.
The Chornobyl accident began in the early hours of April 26, 1986, during a late-night safety test on Unit 4 of the Soviet-designed plant. Reactor design flaws and operator errors triggered a power surge that ripped the reactor open and released radioactive material into the air.
Soviet authorities did not immediately acknowledge the scale of the accident. The disaster became public only after elevated radiation levels were detected at a nuclear facility in Stockholm, about 1,200km away. Pripyat, the city built for plant workers and their families, was evacuated the next day; residents were told to take food and clothing for only a few days.
Two plant workers died on the night of the explosion, and 28 emergency workers and personnel died in the following weeks from acute radiation poisoning. The longer-term toll remains contested. The World Health Organization has estimated up to 4,000 deaths from radiation-related cancers, while Greenpeace put forward a far higher estimate in 2006. The International Atomic Energy Agency has said thyroid cancer rates among people exposed as children in contaminated areas are far above normal levels.
The damaged reactor was first enclosed in a concrete-and-steel sarcophagus built by the end of 1986 and later replaced by the New Safe Confinement in 2016. Around the plant, contamination remains uneven: some areas of the zone carry far higher radiation than others, requiring continuous monitoring.
At the Chornobyl Centre for Nuclear Safety, Radioactive Waste and Radioecology, scientists track radiation readings across the zone and help control exposure for workers and inhabitants. Among them is Tatyana Nikitina, a former Pripyat resident and radiation specialist whose husband, Oleksandr Oslyak, worked at the plant after the disaster as one of the “liquidators” assigned to contain its consequences.
Nikitina told Al Jazeera she believes the disaster gradually destroyed her husband’s health, though a direct medical link cannot be proved. “Bit by bit it broke him down,” she said.
Others returned despite official restrictions. More than 1,000 people are estimated to have moved back into the exclusion zone in the years after the disaster; as that population has aged, the number of so-called self-settlers has fallen to about 100. They are mostly elderly residents with deep roots in the area and are informally tolerated by authorities.
One of them, 87-year-old Valentyna Borysivna, lives near Chornobyl town. During an air raid siren, she reflected on having lived through both World War II and Russia’s current war: “I was two and a half when World War II came here, and it seems I will die in this war now; there is no end in sight to this.”
Chornobyl town, outside the most contaminated “hot zone,” now functions as an administrative centre for the restricted area. Pripyat, closer to the plant, remains abandoned, its buildings decaying and its streets empty.
The zone’s future is still defined by uncertainties that have persisted since 1986: the long-term health effects of radiation exposure, the management of contaminated land and waste, and the added risk that war could damage infrastructure built to contain one of the world’s worst nuclear accidents.
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