Russian Soldiers Suffering a Tragic Fate Due to Reckless Orders of Superiors

What they were doing was suicide.

A worker at the Chernobyl (“Chernobyl” in Ukrainian) nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine, interviewed by Reuters, said. The workers speak of “them” as Russian soldiers. What was the horrifying “suicidal act” that the Russian soldiers were committing?

Since taking control of the plant on February 24, Russian troops have occupied the plant for more than a month and detained more than 200 workers.

The workers were forced to work hard. Usually they work in 12-hour shifts, but they were forbidden to go home and worked continuously without a break. They slept and woke up on tables and on the floor, and had only one meal a day of bread. The state of exhaustion was probably extreme. There were concerns that the workers might make a serious operational error, such as a malfunction of the spent fuel cooling system, due to the extremely tense situation with Russian soldiers with guns around them.

It was not until March 31 that we learned that the Russian military, which had detained the workers, had withdrawn from the Chernobyl plant. The Ukrainian nuclear corporation Energoatom announced that “no outsiders” were on the plant grounds.

Twenty times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb

And at the same time, the company also commented that:

There are reports that Russian troops were exposed to significant doses of radiation.

What happened to the Russian soldiers at the plant?

It seems that many Russian soldiers were forced to dig trenches in the forests within 10 km of the plant, and that the Chernobyl nuclear accident in April 1986 rained down on the area 20 times more radioactive material than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

The trees turned reddish brown and died, and the area is called the “Red Forest” or “Forest of Death”. Humans are forbidden to enter the area, and the maximum contamination level is 1,000 milli sieverts per hour. The maximum level of contamination is 1,000 milli sieverts per hour, which can cause symptoms such as nausea and in the worst case scenario, cancer and other deadly diseases.

The “Forest of Death” also contains a large amount of high-level radioactive waste from the nuclear power plant accident.

In such a highly contaminated area, Russian soldiers were working in ordinary military uniforms without protective clothing. Some of them even dug trenches with their bare hands. Some were drinking contaminated water on a daily basis. It is very likely that they inhaled large amounts of radioactive materials and were exposed to radiation in their bodies. I don’t think most of the soldiers knew what a dangerous place they were working in. （It is no wonder that the nuclear plant workers (mentioned at the beginning of this article) talk about it as ‘suicide’).

It is not known why the Russian military withdrew from Chernobyl. However, it is said that seven buses full of retreating soldiers entered the “Medical Center for Radiation Specialties” in Gomel, southeast Belarus. The Russian military probably had little knowledge of the dreadful effects of radioactive materials.

Soldiers in the field are suffering a tragic fate because of the reckless orders of their superiors.