Nurse Breaks Her Silence About Deadly Poison at Chernobyl

by A.R. Fomenko

VIENNA BUREAU — On the grim anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown, a Belarusian nurse breaks her silence – not about the original disaster, but about its haunting encore.

“Svetlana,” now retired, was a nurse at a radiation treatment ward in Gomel, Belarus. In 2022, as war spread across Ukraine, the encore surfaced in the form of Russian soldiers, sick with a strange syndrome.

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“They came in filthy, vomiting, very unwell.” The former nurse’s voice is steady but low, like she’s still guarding a state secret, long after she left Belarus. “There is a deadly poison at Chernobyl. They were drenched in it.”

What did she think had happened to the men to leave them in such condition?

“We were told they had been near a power station. We knew which one.”

Svetlana encountered her patients after they got sick inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in February 2022. That is the site of one of the worst nuclear disasters in history. It occurred on April 26, 1986, when a reactor at the Chernobyl power plant exploded. Radiation spread across the region and beyond. The area has been largely abandoned ever since. Except for a brief period amid war.

The Red Forest

On the day Russia invaded Ukraine, Russian soldiers arrived in the zone. While there, they drove their armored vehicles through the highly radioactive Red Forest surrounding Chernobyl. The forest takes its name from the pine trees that turned red after absorbing radiation from the 1986 explosion.

The soldiers didn’t know about the explosion, the locals have said. They didn’t know about the pine trees. So they dug trenches into the irradiated Red Forest, and camped there. They wore no protective gear. They reportedly hunted animals for food, and fished in the reactor’s water-cooling channel. And they got sick.

A Russian soldier was said to have died from exposure to radiation. Another is believed to have become extremely ill, after he allegedly used his hands to pick up a sample of highly toxic cobalt-60. Many were plagued with painful ulcers on their skin.

“I cannot say what is true of all these stories,” Svetlana said. “But this was very bad for their health. A lot of them got sick.” 

While Moscow denied any serious radiation exposure, Svetlana’s account joins a body of testimony that suggests otherwise. 

Employees of the Chernobyl nuclear plant say Russian soldiers showed signs of radiation poisoning during their occupation. Some were taken by bus to Belarus, according to Lyudmyla Kozak, who worked at the power plant.

“They were vomiting and had big blisters on their skin,” Kozak told RFE/RL.

Others looted items from the reactor, according to Oleksandr Borsukov, of Ukraine’s Center for Radiation Control.

“It was scary looking. Everything was smashed,” Borsukov told RFE/RL. “The server was torn out.”

The items they brought out could be contaminated, one official told me. 

This is why medical workers in the region need to pay attention, the official said – so as not to repeat the scenario described by Dr. Alla Shapiro, who treated patients in the immediate aftermath of the explosion at Chernobyl. At the time, local doctors were not prepared to treat nor diagnose radiation, Shapiro wrote in an essay. They were forced to proceed while the crisis raged.

Still a Hazard

As another April 26 dawns on a scarred earth, engineers are facing a new Chernobyl challenge. This one involving a hole in the protective shield, caused by a Russian drone strike in February. Fixing the hole is a logistical nightmare, officials say. The radiation levels rise with the roof, making it dangerous to the repair crews. They still are trying to contain a disaster that technically never ended.

For Svetlana, the memory remains present. She no longer lives and works in Belarus. But she keeps up with news of her former workplace, and of the place that brought such very sick soldiers into her ward just three short years ago.

“Chernobyl is still a hazard,” she says. “Still a target. Still a place that can poison you.

“It’s not just history. It’s now.”

A.R. Fomenko is based out of Soldier of Fortune’s Vienna Bureau.