Ukrainians gather to mark the 39th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster

Ukrainians gathered on Saturday to honour the victims and clean-up crews of the biggest nuclear disaster in history, Chernobyl, during a ceremony held in the northern town of Prypyat.

Prypyat, now a ghost town, previously served the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

The event, which marked the 39th anniversary of the 1986 catastrophe, was attended by plant employees, colleagues of the victims, survivors, their relatives, and government officials.

Attendees laid flowers at the monument dedicated to the “liquidators” — in other terms, the civil and military personnel who were called upon to deal with the consequences — and observed a minute of silence.

During the ceremony, state awards and honorary distinctions were presented to the liquidators of the Chernobyl disaster, as well as to those involved in responding to the aftermath of the Russian UAV strike on 14 February 2025, which hit the arch of the new safe confinement.

As the Kyiv Regional State Administration recalled, Russian forces seized the Chernobyl zone in the early days of the full-scale invasion. Although Ukrainian forces liberated the area in the spring of 2022, the nuclear threat has not disappeared.

Russian soldiers occupied the “exclusion zone” around the Chernobyl plant for more than five weeks, possibly suffering from radiation poisoning.

During the gathering, Svitlana Grinchuk, Minister of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources of Ukraine, expressed gratitude to those who remained at the plant during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“Today I would also like to take this opportunity to thank those people who stayed at their workplaces on 24 February 2022. Despite the danger, despite the fact that there was a direct threat to their lives and health, they ensured the operation of the plant and enterprises critical to maintaining radiation safety not only for Ukraine but for the entire European continent,” she said.

According to official figures, 31 people died from the immediate effects of radiation after the 1986 disaster, and nearly 8.4 million people across Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine were exposed to radiation.

The consequences of it are still impossible to evaluate – but we do know that a huge radioactive cloud gradually reached almost every corner of the Earth. Today, 30 kilometres around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant remains an exclusion zone.