Vines twirl through the broken windows of long-abandoned homes, where the detritus of lives interrupted by disaster are still scattered about: children\u2019s shoes, dishes, coats hanging on pegs, all covered in lichen and dust.<\/p>\n
The ghost towns of the Chernobyl exclusion zone in northern Ukraine emptied of people after the catastrophic explosion and meltdown at the nuclear power plant there 40 years ago, on April 26, 1986. High levels of radiation mean humans may never live in them again.<\/p>\n
But these towns served another purpose for Ukrainian soldiers who recently trained amid the ruins. The troops practiced defending the irradiated land against a repeat Russian attack, taking precautions to avoid the most radioactive areas. In February 2022, Moscow\u2019s forces entered the zone on the first day of the full-scale invasion, and occupied it for five weeks.<\/p>\n
During the exercise, soldiers crouched beside waterlogged, mold-covered walls, aiming their rifles. Others threw live grenades into homes, chipping walls already crumbling from dry rot. Their presence highlighted a reality in the Chernobyl zone: For the foreseeable future, it will be an army-controlled security belt along the border with Belarus, a Russian ally.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverything depends on security\u201d in the zone today, said the commander of the battalion training in the area, who asked to be identified by only his nickname, Skif, in keeping with military protocol.<\/p>\n
The explosion in 1986, set off by a safety test and exacerbated by design flaws, spewed fire and radioactive material into the air, in the world\u2019s worst nuclear disaster. Two workers were killed in the initial explosion, over two dozen emergency responders and cleanup workers died in the three months after from radiation exposure, and some 200,000 people<\/a> are believed to have been relocated from the area. <\/p>\n Over the years, the radioactive towns, villages, forests and swamps have posed quandaries for the authorities. The land could never be repopulated, they concluded, because of contamination from long-lingering isotopes, including plutonium.<\/p>\n But it could bring economic benefits. Ideas included using it as a storage area for other countries\u2019 nuclear waste, as a test site for new generations of small modular reactors, as territory for solar farms and as a destination for so-called disaster tourism.<\/p>\n Now, everything, other than modest solar-farm development, is on indefinite hold. Tourists, who began showing up at the site 20 years ago, are not coming back anytime soon, said Shaun Burnie, the senior nuclear specialist with Greenpeace Ukraine. Chernobyl has become one disaster layered on another: war fought in a radioactive zone.<\/p>\n Russia\u2019s invasion in 2022 harmed efforts to contain radiation in multiple ways. Moscow\u2019s forces occupied the crippled nuclear power station and used it as a staging area for attacks on Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, early in the war. Their heavy armored vehicles stirred up small amounts of radioactive dust. Weeks later, Russian troops were defeated in the battle for Kyiv, and they withdrew from Chernobyl.<\/p>\n More worrisome are longer-term war risks. Scientists cannot reach wells that measure groundwater radiation, lest they step on a land mine. Also owing to mines, firefighters cannot rush to extinguish wildfires that spread radiation in smoke. Foreign scientists who studied radiation in the environment have fled.<\/p>\n