-
Russian troops began their withdrawal from the Chernobyl disaster site in March in 1986.
-
But Ukrainian workers are now discovering what they’ve left behind — including human feces.
-
“The poop was the icing on the cake,” said the deputy director of the Chernobyl Ecocenter.
Russian troops may have evacuated the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, but they destroyed the property, leaving piles of feces in every office, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
During the Russian occupation, hundreds of Ukrainian workers were held hostage for weeks. Now workers are moving to clean up the site following the withdrawal of Russian troops in late March after being hit by “significant doses of radiation”.
Aleksandr Barsukov, the deputy director of the Chernobyl Ecocenter, told The Journal they found spray-painted conference rooms, smashed computer screens and 100 liters of high-quality vodka.
“The poop was the icing on the cake,” Barsukov said.
Chernobyl, the site of the 1986 Soviet nuclear disaster, took a total of five weeks on the first day of the war.
After disrupting the ground, soldiers panicked at the first sign of radiation sickness, which “emerged very quickly,” Ukraine’s state energy company Energoatom told The Guardian. The outlet reported that the panic led to troops withdrawing from the region.
“When the invasion started, the front guards were called to fall back because a huge influx of Russian troops was coming,” Julia Bezdizha, a factory spokeswoman, told WSJ. “They mostly fled because it was very dangerous to stay and fight hard because of the heavy radiation.”
Russian troops had also seized Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, Zaporizhzhya, at the start of the war. Due to the occupation of the factories, some were concerned about a nuclear reaction and increased radiation levels.
The exact impact on Russian soldiers is currently unknown, but troops are reported to have dug trenches in radioactive soil and moved around the factory without protective equipment.
Radiation exposure can affect a person’s health in many different ways — including acute radiation syndrome, cancer and mental distress — according to The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Yevhen Kramarenko, head of Ukraine’s state agency for the management of exclusion zones, said at a news conference in April that it is unclear how radiation levels in the area have been affected by Russian forces.
But, he adds, “we believe very quickly [the Russians] will feel the effects of the radiation they have received. Some of them will feel it in months, some of them in years.”
“But anyway, all the military who were there will feel it at some point,” Kramarenko continued.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked war against Ukraine began on February 24 and is still ongoing.
The Chernobyl nuclear power plant did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
Read the original article on Business Insider
