Ukraine’s president lashed out at Russia, accusing it of “nuclear terrorism,” as Kyiv observed the 40th anniversary of the explosion at the Chernobyl power plant, the world’s worst civilian atomic disaster.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy criticized Moscow citing Russian drone flights over the remnants of the destroyed plant in northern Ukraine. Last year, a Russian drone hit the protective “sarcophagus” built to try and seal off the radioactive debris.
Russia is "again bringing the world to the brink of a man-made disaster,” he said in an April 26 post to Telegram.
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The incident at Chernobyl occurred in the early morning of April 26, 1986, when a routine test at the Soviet-designed plant went awry, sparking a fire and an explosion that sent a cloud of radioactive dust and fallout across northern Ukraine, Belarus, and into Scandinavia.
The immediate explosion killed only a handful of plant technicians, but thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of emergency workers, soldiers, nearby residents were also exposed to a high level of radiation.
A massive concrete 'sarcophagus' was erected over the destroyed reactor to contain radioactive dust.
There is no definite consensus of how many people died as a result of the disaster. In a 2005 report, the United Nations put the number of confirmed and projected deaths in the three worst-affected countries at 4,000. Greenpeace estimated that the disaster had caused close to 100,000 deaths.
Belarus, the country that suffered the worst after Ukraine, had large swaths of its southern regions irradiated, leaving them uninhabitable.
Belarusian leader Aleksandr Lukashenko did not immediately issue any statement on the anniversary of the accident.
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However, Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya, an opposition leader whom many countries recognize as rightful leader of Belarus, issued a statement saying the “disaster changed Belarus forever.”
“Chernobyl showed what happens when those in power are not accountable,” she said in a social media post.
There was no immediate statement from Russian officials in Moscow.