Devastating effects of Russia’s invasion on Ukraine’s Chornobyl zone revealed

An environmental expert group visited the Chornobyl exclusion zone in Ukraine on Saturday inspecting damage done by Russian troops in the first month of the invasion in 2022. Russian forces occupied the defunct power station north of Kyiv soon after invading Ukraine on February 24, 2022, but had left the plant amid a withdrawal from Ukraine’s north. They had built fortifications including trenches in the so-called Red Forest, the most radioactively contaminated part of the zone around Chornobyl, Ukraine’s state nuclear company Energoatom said. The exclusion zone was established because of high radiation levels in the area after a nuclear reactor exploded at the plant in April 1986. The group’s co-chair and former Swedish foreign minister Margot Wallstrom and several other members of the 12-person group were in Kyiv to discuss a report on how the war affects Ukraine’s environment. The international group, established last year by Ukraine’s presidential adm