Chernobyl Liquidators Revisit Site on 40th Anniversary

Ukraine marked the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster on Sunday, as a group of former Soviet-era cleanup workers known as liquidators returned to the site near Pripyat for the first time in decades. The visit, organized ahead of the April 26 commemoration, allowed survivors from Ukraine's Poltava region to revisit the abandoned power plant where an explosion in reactor number four unleashed the worst civilian nuclear accident in history.

The disaster occurred at 1:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986, in northern Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. A safety test gone wrong, compounded by reactor design flaws and procedural violations, triggered a steam explosion and fire that exposed the reactor core and released radioactive material into the atmosphere. The plume contaminated large areas of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia before spreading across Europe. Soviet authorities delayed public acknowledgment, with the first international alert coming from Sweden on April 28 after detecting elevated radiation levels.

In the immediate aftermath, about 600,000 liquidators from across the USSR mobilized over four years to contain the crisis. Soldiers, firefighters, engineers, miners...