The One Part of Ukraine That Russia Doesn't Want

Chernobyl has been shut down since 2000 (WSJ photo)

Headline: Russia Hands Control of Chernobyl Back to Ukraine, Officials Say

The Russian troops began leaving in phases on Tuesday, and the entire Russian deployment had left the area by late Thursday. That concluded a five-week occupation of the defunct plant that began on the first afternoon of the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, when Russian troops arrived at the plant, the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident...

The recent situation at the plant has been the subject of intense speculation since the Russians overran it. Ukraine’s intelligence agency claimed that Russia was preparing a false-flag attack on the exclusion zone—the 1,000-square-mile, mostly uninhabited area around the plant—to blame Ukraine as a pretext for escalating the war. Russian state media said Ukraine was close to building a plutonium-based “dirty bomb” at Chernobyl. Neither side provided evidence for its claims.

All of Chernobyl’s reactors have been shut down since 2000, but the plant still employs thousands of staff to keep cool water circulating over thousands of spent fuel rods kept in four-story-deep basins lined with steel and reinforced concrete.

The Red Forest's dead trees have been removed
but the radiation remains (TNR)

According to Ukraine, the Russians didn't leave because of Ukrainian military action:

Several hundred Russian soldiers were forced to hastily withdraw from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine after suffering “acute radiation sickness” from contaminated soil, according to Ukrainian officials.

The troops, who dug trenches in a contaminated Red Forest near the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history, are now reportedly being treated in a special medical facility in Gomel, Belarus. The forest is so named because thousands of pine trees turned red during the 1986 nuclear disaster. The area is considered so highly toxic that not even highly specialized Chernobyl workers are allowed to enter the zone.

News from either side is untrustworthy, but so far there is no negative evidence or counter-argument to the conclusion that the Russians "won" Chernobyl without knowing of its dangers.

But how could they not know of the most (in)famous nuclear accident in history? The degree of organized stupidity in one of the most formidable militaries on the planet is very difficult to believe.