The cruelty and ignorance of Russia can cause another Chornobyl. How long will we allow a dictator to terrorise us?

SEAN GALLUP/GETTY IMAGES

Someone who has faced the reality of ‘never,’ can’t go back. When you lose someone, you experience not only grief but also the inevitability that part of your heart is lost forever.

Since my father died unexpectedly, I’ve been covered with this complexity of ‘never’ like with the freezing Ukrainian wind, somewhere in February. “I will never see or hear him again” — I couldn’t bear this thought, and still can’t, because the real comprehension of it is more devious than my brain can perceive. You learn to live with it, however — alongside other ‘nevers’ that find you on your way.

This obscure and perplexing idea of ‘never’ became reality for Ukraine in April 1986. Never again will we see the beautiful leafy area of Polissia like it used to be. Never again would we be able to go to our ancestors’ graves and celebrate their life with the resurrection of cities and villages. Never again will we see life as it used to be.

My grandma on my father’s side came from a Polish-Ukrainian family in the north of Ukraine, which is now an Exclusion Zone. She fell in love with my grandfather there, she got married there, and lived there ’til the mid-sixties before moving south of the Kyiv region.

Her childhood and youth smelled like forests and fresh mushrooms, with a river that was the main entertainment in the area. She was a child of war, born in 1937 and witnessing a World War where an estimated 8 million Ukrainians died.

When I was a kid, I heard some stories about the war. The funniest one was about my great-grandma, who ran after the Ukrainian partisans to give them grenades that had been left behind. She put them in her apron and ran as fast as she could because Nazis were coming. She was not afraid of grenades. She was not frightened by the Germans. She was not scared of anything.

Now, my grandma is 85 and just like her mother, she is not afraid of anything. But she could have never imagined that another World War would start in front of her eyes, especially so blatantly. The difference between these two wars equals the weight of the planet — this time, the aggressor possesses nuclear weapons. On top of it, the nuclear power facilities of the invaded country are under threat of destruction.

Prypiat before the Chornobyl catastrophe, 1984.

I was born 5 years after the deadly catastrophe in Chornobyl and grew up in the zone that was considered highly affected by the disaster — only 100 km from the place. Along with other kids in my town, I had what we called a Chornobyl passport — it gave us some perks from the Chornobyl Relief Fund, like free canteen food in school.

The shadow of Chornobyl has been hovering over everyday life. The streets in my home neighborhood have names connected to Chorbobyl, its survivors and its liquidators. When I visited my dad at work in the local fire department, I needed to cross the hallway with photos of the firefighters who died in Chornobyl. They didn’t know where they were sent. They died in excruciating pain and became postmortem heroes. Did they ever wish to be heroes?

A memorial, dedicated to firefighters and workers who died after the Chornobyl disaster, 2016. Source: Reuters Photo/Gleb Garanich

I could never have been born if my father became a firefighter before the disaster. But he had another task to do in 1986: track down his grandfather who had been evacuated from the Chornobyl area, and had been lost for two months because the Soviet Government denied knowledge of his whereabouts. It’s no secret that officials lied about the disaster, and many people died simply because they were unaware of the threat.

Today, we are aware of the threat.

Like real-life Soviet gulag prisoners, every employee of the Chornobyl NPP was under intense psychological pressure from Russian occupiers. The armed forces interrogated staff members upon arrival, and the staff lived on meager rations, never getting adequate sleep or fresh clothing. Lack of heat in winter exacerbated all of these issues, and there were no health care provisions.

On March 22, 2022, the Russian occupiers looted and destroyed a new 6-million-euro laboratory. The lab was Chornobyl’s newest, powerful in its analytical capabilities, and able to provide services for radioactive waste management at all stages. Highly active samples were stored at the lab. Russian soldiers even dug trenches in the highly contaminated Red Forest, reportedly getting radiation sickness, with one case being fatal.

Now, the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone is liberated by the Ukrainian army, and we can hear stories from the staff. As one of the captured workers of the CNPP, Bohdan Serdiuk, said: “Russian occupants didn’t understand why they captured Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant.” The ignorance of those who blindly follow orders, seeing no problem in terrorizing civilians and increasing nuclear threat, is absolutely depraving.

People attend rally after a council official was kidnapped in Enerhodar, 2022. Source: pravda.com.ua

Another Ukrainian power plant, Zaporizhzhia NPP in Enerhodar, is still under the military control of Russian occupants. It’s the biggest nuclear power plant in Europe, and an incident there can contaminate half of Ukraine, a big part of Russia, the Azov and Black Seas, as well as Bulgaria and Turkey.

The seizure of peaceful nuclear facilities is an act of Nuclear Terrorism. No one in the world has done this before.

— MFA of Ukraine, war.ukraine.ua

It’s not some obscure blackmail of nuclear weapons that the Russians are using to enslave our minds. It’s a real, tangible threat of death and destruction that can come to Ukrainian cities, whether because of the cruelty of Russian society, or simply plain ignorance.

They don’t teach about the reasons and consequences of the Chornobyl disaster in Russian schools. They don’t talk about the main engineer who committed suicide because he could not live with all of the lies that had been hidden in the graves of victims, then covered with soil. They do not talk about people like my grandmother who lost her home and connection to her ancestors. People who faced the overwhelming idea of ‘never’ on the scale of losing a backbone of existence.

A society that denies its crimes affirms them. If you deny the responsibility of the Russian government for the Chornobyl disaster, you allow it to happen again. Consciously or unconsciously.

I feel for people who are threatened by the possibility of a nuclear war. It’s a paralyzing fear of a post-apocalyptic future. It feels like every move could be a reason for Putin to end the world. But is it life if we’re living on this man’s permission? Should we band to terrorism and appease it? Or should we liquidate it from our society with the means of democratic power?

Nuclear terrorism embodied by Russia needs to be considered as any other terrorism. Countries with real power have no ambition to bully the world with the possibility of nuclear war. Only shameful despots, like the governments of North Korea, Russia and Iran use it as a way to terrorize the world.

Only a degraded terroristic organization is ready to send their preprogrammed members to self-murder both themselves and innocent people, for the sake of their sickening ideology. It’s not a matter of power, it’s a matter of despair — Russia does not possess any power rather than a stolen Soviet-made nuclear technology base which they use as a way to bully the world, putting their own people under the threat of horrible death. The only ally in the fight against terrorism and dictators is democracy. The same democracy that Ukraine is protecting right now, risking to face one more ‘never’.

I believe that the only way to fight aggressors is courage. Courage to look into the history and apprehend what we did wrong. Courage to recognize the responsibility for enabling Russia to where it is now — a dictatorship with a centuries-long history of imperialistic ambition, cruelty, disregard for human rights and lives, constant invasions, atrocities and war crimes. The absolutism of the ideology that instills nuclear terror is degrading to the world and any human values. This ideology does not deserve to have nuclear weapons, and moreover, to be a part of the civilized world.

If the world sees the Russian regime contemptuously dismantling all the agreements regarding nuclear safety and does nothing to change it, then there is no such thing as international law anymore. So, what laws are we following?

Ukrainians know what ‘never’ means. We’re afraid, but we’ll never lose our courage in standing for the future of our country and global democracy. We are not disposable people who can be easily sacrificed for the rest of the world to live their peaceful lives. There is never going to be peace while a dictatorship, strengthened by its weak society, has nuclear weapons. There is going to be no peace unless the inevitable idea of ‘never’ will mean not destruction and death, but a concise agreement that never again we’ll be bullied by a self-proclaimed ruler of the world. Never again should we be terrorized by a desperate state.

Never again should children die because we, adults, were too weak to fight back.