Chernobyl: why is Russia interested in the site of the biggest nuclear disaster in history?

(CNN Spanish) — Russian troops on Thursday took control of the Chernobyl plant in northern Ukraine, the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history decades ago, during the first day of their invasion of Ukrainian territory.

The fighting continued this Friday in different parts of the country, including Kyiv, the capital, the Donbas region and the south facing the Crimean peninsula, taken by Russia in 2014. It is an attack along the borders of Ukraine with Russia and Belarus.

But why did Russia decide to take control of the nuclear plant, now deactivated, and the city of Chernobyl, an area abandoned since 1986 and still partially contaminated by radiation, so early in the war?

Since the disaster there is a 30-kilometre Exclusion Zone around the Chernobyl plant. This includes the towns of Pripyat, next to the nuclear plant, and Chernobyl, some 15 kilometers away, which have become ghost towns.

The Russian invasion at Chernobyl

The Chernobyl plant is located about 15 kilometers from the border between Ukraine and Belarus, from where one of the many advances on Ukraine by Russian troops comes. It is also about 100 kilometers north of Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine.

Russian soldiers arrived at the plant on the first day of the invasion, a spokesman for the Ukrainian State Agency for the Management of Exclusion Zones, Yevgeniya Kuznetsov, told CNN.

Alyona Shevtsova, adviser to the commander of the Ukrainian Ground Forces, said on Facebook that Russian forces took control of the power plant and the staff were taken “hostage”.

Meanwhile Mykhailo Podolyak, a Ukrainian presidential adviser, said control of the Chernobyl zone was lost after a “fierce battle”. He added that the status of the nuclear waste storage facilities at the former Chernobyl power plant is unknown.

On the other hand, the spokesman for the Russian Ministry of Defense, Igor Konashenkov, said told the Russian state agency Tass that the paratroopers who seized the plant “reached an agreement with the Ukrainian personnel to secure the nuclear reactor and the sarcophagus that protects it.”

Ukraine’s nuclear agency and interior ministry said on Friday they were recording rising radiation levels at the site after it was seized by Russia, Reuters reported.

The Kremlin denied these claims and said that the levels were normal.

Why did Russia decide to capture Chernobyl?

The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is in the middle of the most direct route from the Belarusian border, where one of Russia’s main attacks has been launched, to Kyiv. This geographical location had already led the Ukrainian government to deploy troops to the site in early February, expecting an attack.

A Russian security source quoted by Reuters said Russian soldiers even concentrated in the Exclusion Zone, which covers part of Belarusian territory, before crossing into Ukraine on Thursday at the start of the invasion.

The source said Russia was seeking to control the Chernobyl plant to signal to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the US-led defensive alliance at the center of the conflict over Ukraine’s attempts to join, not interfere militarily.

Konashenkov, meanwhile, said that the capture of the Chernobyl plant was “a guarantee that nationalist groups and other terrorist organizations will not be able to use the current situation in the country to carry out a nuclear provocation”, echoing Putin’s baseless accusations against the government of Ukraine.

What happened at Chernobyl in 1986

An explosion destroyed reactor No. 4 at the Vladimir Lenin plant in Chernobyl, then controlled by the Soviet Union, on April 26, 1986 and during a failed safety test.

Clouds of radioactive material spread across Europe in what became the worst nuclear disaster in history.

More than 30 people died immediately after the blast, and in the years that followed many more died from radiation symptoms, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organization.

The Ukrainian government has evacuated some 135,000 people from the area and the 30km exclusion zone around the plant is expected to remain uninhabitable for decades. Still, some people continue to live in Chernobyl and maintenance personnel continue to work on the reactor.

In the months after the accident, a sarcophagus was built to cover the No. 4 reactor and contain the radioactive material. However, it has since deteriorated, leading to radiation leaks.

In 2016, a structure known as New Safe Confinement. The huge arch-shaped design is intended to prevent the release of contaminated material, as well as to protect the sarcophagus from external impacts, such as tornadoes or extreme electrical storms.