Hundreds of Russian Federation (RF) army troops stationed in Ukraine’s Chornobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) likely received severe and in many cases lethal doses of radiation, a senior environmental protection official said late on Tuesday evening, April 6.
Ruslan Strelets, Ukraine’s Vice Minister for Protection of the Environment and Natural Resources (PENR) during a nationally-aired TV news marathon said his agency’s scientists have uncovered hundreds of dugouts, bunkers and improvised living areas, constructed by RF troops in some of the most irradiated sections of the CEZ.
Chornobyl’s reactor number four went critical after a failed power generation experiment in April 1986, triggering a steam explosion and fire spreading radioactive dust as far away as Sweden. The 2,600 square km. CEZ is a guarded territory around the reactor’s radioactive remains. Much of the region is relatively benign pine and hardwood wetland filled with burgeoning wildlife, but, isolated spots within the zone, particularly near the reactor, are still are highly radioactive.
RF forces occupied the CEZ from Feb. 25 through March 31. UAF forces followed by CEZ engineers returning to the site found that RF troops had used the containment facility at the station reactor four containment facility as an ammunition depot, and had dug in fighting positions and bunkers all around it, Strelets said.
Particularly widespread excavation, along with evidence of RF troops living their for weeks at a time, was found in a pine forest notorious for extremely high radiation, known locally as the “Red Forest” from the color the radiation turned the trees’ needles. Russian soldiers occupying those positions inevitably came into contact with highly dangerous and probably the lethal radiation doses, he said.
“Our specialists say that if one spends 48 hours in the Red Forest he will receive a radiation dose similar to a radiation one receives over the course of year. That is, factually anyone who was stationed there (in Red Forest dugouts and trenches) – they are walking dead, they are people who have no chances of a future life,” Strelets said.
The Ukraine Defense Ministry on Wednesday released drone footage showing major military excavations in the Red Forest and sites around it. Potentially, the positions could have contained one to three thousand troops, and their vehicles. A Ukraine Army General Staff statement on Friday identified the Russian Far East Fleet’s 155th Marine Brigade as the unit most closely deployed to Chornobyl.
Over the weekend Belarusian news agencies reported a wave of new admissions of RF service personnel to a radiation exposure treatment clinic in Gomel’. UAF intelligence estimates on Monday confirmed the reports, and said hundreds of RF soldiers had received treatment. Neither the news reports nor the official estimates gave information about the soldiers’ current condition.
