Chornobyl’s silence deepens as war, radiation and time close in on Prypiat’s ruins

27 April, 12:28 PM

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Energetik Palace of Culture in Prypiat, April 2026 (Photo: Serhii Okunev / NV)

Chornobyl’s second life: Why the city is no longer a ghost town

The area is full of geographic traps that are familiar to Ukrainians but often confuse foreigners. Because the name “Chornobyl” is so closely tied to the events of 1986, many assume the city itself suffered the worst consequences of the man-made and environmental disaster.

Chornobyl today would almost certainly surprise even those with only a passing knowledge of its history. After passing the exclusion zone checkpoint and seeing the first radiation warning signs a few hundred meters later, no one expects to find a city where life has returned.

In reality, Chornobyl was never truly a ghost town. Even immediately after the disaster, workers remained there. The plant continued operating in part, other businesses connected to the nuclear station kept staff on site, and specialists studied the consequences of the explosion. In the first months after the disaster, Chornobyl went through several rounds of decontamination and special cleanup measures that helped reduce radioactive contamination.

At the height of Chornobyl tourism, from 2010 to 2022, the city had a hotel, several stores, a souvenir shop and a tour company office. There are no tourists now. But life in Chornobyl has not faded. If anything, it may be gathering pace.

Russian forces have struck the Chornobyl zone more than once. At the start of the invasion, they occupied the plant and a large surrounding area. That has forced Ukraine’s military to take steps that should not be discussed publicly. One way or another, Chornobyl’s permanent population has grown in recent years with a sizable number of people responsible for security.

More people means demand for more services. Stores and cafes operate in Chornobyl. There is even a distinctly hip coffee shop in the city center. Inside, it is hard to believe that when you step outside, you will see Chornobyl’s streets rather than Kyiv’s Zoloti Vorota or Podil neighborhoods.

People are not the only ones returning to the Zone. Wildlife is booming. In 2015, researchers found that the exclusion zone had seven times more wolves than similar areas in this part of Ukraine. Moose, deer, wild boars and other animals also live here in large numbers.

Perhaps the clearest example is Przewalski’s horses. In the early 1990s, only 20 to 30 of them were recorded in the Zone, and they were considered nearly extinct in the wild in Ukraine. By 2025–2026, their population had grown almost fourfold. There are now more than 120.

Wild animals move through the area like its true owners, entering the city and even approaching the Chornobyl plant. The NV journalist was lucky enough to see rare Przewalski’s horses without much effort: They crossed one of the main roads and barely reacted to the occasional passing car. The horses grazed beside a “Radiation hazard” sign, though specialists say their health is normal.

A drone strike on a nuclear scar: Inside the sarcophagus after Russia’s attack

Getting to the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant has always been difficult. Getting there during wartime is a rare opportunity. Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry invited a limited group of journalists, mostly foreign, to make the trip and again draw attention to the problems Ukraine faces under Russian aggression.

The program included the area around the plant, reactor control rooms and even a short “tour” beneath the sarcophagus. But first came a long list of preparations. Visitors were asked to have the level of radionuclides in their bodies measured to determine whether they had arrived already contaminated. The test is simple: a large chair, a computer, five minutes of waiting — and then the result.

“If everything is fine, you get up. If not, the chair shocks you,” one journalist joked.

No one tested contaminated on arrival. To make sure that did not change later, visitors had to put on special suits, use protective equipment and follow instructions from plant specialists. If an item fell on the floor, for example, it could not be picked up until a dosimetrist checked it. After hearing that, some colleagues chose to leave their phones in the lockers with their clothes, just in case. Camera operators with tripods drew special attention. Their equipment would be scanned again after the work was done.

The long preparation ended. Ahead was the unit control room of Chornobyl’s third reactor. It was the plant’s last operating reactor and was finally shut down on Dec. 15, 2000. The control room is a medium-sized room containing the equipment — the reactor’s “brain” and other systems used to operate the unit. Journalists were shown the third reactor’s control room so they would have a point of comparison. Next came the same kind of room, but at the fourth reactor.

Filming in the third reactor’s control room was allowed for a fairly long time. The protocol for visiting the fourth reactor’s “brain” was much stricter. Time was limited. Touching surfaces was forbidden. Respirators and gloves were mandatory.

Control room No. 4 is in far worse condition. Immediately after the disaster, crews spent a long time fighting the fire there, as archival footage shows. This was not ordinary firefighting. Water, sand, boron and other substances were dropped to stop the burning. The fire, the effort to put it out and the passage of time have left the control room half-ruined. There is clearly nothing to repair here, and no reason to do it.

A plant employee pointed to the place where the famous button once was — the button whose pressing triggered the chain of events that led to the disaster. The moment was dramatized, among other places, in the HBO series. The button is gone. A hole is there now. A few photos of the decaying equipment, and it was time to leave quickly.

“This is the control point for the Shelter Object. I am the shift supervisor here. Our task is to monitor the condition of the object, all key indicators, changes and so on. The events of Feb. 14, 2025, significantly changed our agenda. The dismantling of the Shelter is not happening now. But we have new tasks — eliminating the consequences of the strike on the confinement,” plant employee Serhii Bokov said.

The Shelter Object is the protective sarcophagus built immediately after the disaster in a record 206 days. The confinement is a far more advanced and reliable protective structure installed in 2019 over the old Soviet Shelter, which had become less reliable over time and even faced the risk of partial collapse. The new protective arch is much larger. It was designed not only to shield the outside world from radiation from the remains of the fourth reactor, but also to make it possible to dismantle the old Shelter. If not for the full-scale invasion, the dismantling was supposed to be completed by the end of 2023. Occupation, looting, war and a Shahed strike on the confinement completely changed the work plan.

“I was on shift then. There was an explosion, and we felt everything shaking around us. Our room is very close to the impact site, so we heard it clearly. I went outside. At first, I could not see anything — I only smelled burning. Obviously, it was an emergency, especially when you still do not understand what exactly happened. We have many instruments that measure a large number of different indicators — outside, under the confinement, on the Shelter itself and partly inside the Shelter. We recorded a seismic shock. The readings went beyond normal limits but returned almost immediately. Later, of course, we understood the full picture. The information was urgently passed to the State Emergency Service. We hold regular drills with them, so there was a protocol for what to do,” Bokov recalled.

The specialist said he did not have time to be afraid because he had not believed the aggressor country would dare launch a drone strike: “I wanted to believe that our plant was still untouchable.”

On Feb. 14, 2025, an enemy drone nearly pierced the outer layer of the confinement. By an astonishing coincidence, it hit an area with a small technical annex. If the drone had fallen a few meters to the side, its wreckage — or even its main body — could likely have hit the old Shelter, which is already unstable. The consequences could have been critical.

“Maybe some people think the arch is just metal. If it is pierced, you can take a new piece and cover it, like a hole in a fence. But that is not how it works. This is a very complex, multilayered structure that requires airtightness, air circulation and the operation of many sensors, pumps and other systems. Any breach of the structure’s integrity, even a seemingly minor one, affects the entire complex. Right now, it is working differently than it should. But there are no critical problems. Everything is within the norm,” Serhii explained.

Other specialists confirmed his account. The Chornobyl confinement is expected to be repaired no earlier than 2030, and the work will cost an additional EUR 500 million.

After speaking with the plant employee, journalists were able to see everything for themselves. Another safety briefing, large airtight doors at the entrance — and filming began inside the confinement, a few dozen meters from the fourth reactor, above which the old Shelter rises. This is one of the dirtiest areas of the entire plant. Even in protective clothing, people can stay there for only a few minutes.

On the way back, everyone went through a double check. No one received a significant dose, and the camera operators’ tripods also did not show radiation above the norm. Leaving the plant meant repeating all the procedures: multiple radiation measurements, another test in the “electric chair” and only then the return of personal clothing.

Prypiat’s final years: Inside the world’s most contaminated city

Without time limits, the road to Prypiat makes you want to stop every 100 meters. There is an abandoned kindergarten where toys are still scattered; the stele bearing the name “Prypiat,” which received its apostrophe in 2025 and was thus “Ukrainized”; the Red Forest; and the same bridge from which Prypiat residents watched the fire at the plant on the night of April 26, 1986.

Prypiat could once be reached not only by car. It had a river port. From the Yaniv railway station, it was just a three-minute walk to the city market and 10 to 15 minutes to the center. One theory says the station’s name was deliberately not changed to Prypiat for secrecy during the city’s construction. Railway stops near closed cities, military garrisons or strategic facilities in the Soviet Union often had different names, supposedly to mislead foreign intelligence services.

Several trains still stand at the station. They will obviously never go anywhere again. The last railcars from Yaniv carried evacuated Prypiat residents after the disaster. Later, the railway branch, like the city itself, died.

There are no abandoned ships in the river port, but it does have one of the city’s most recognizable murals. With each passing year, both the building and the artwork deteriorate further.

Ruslana Chuchuryna, a senior engineer at the Central Enterprise for Radioactive Waste Management who accompanied the NV journalist in Prypiat, said the decline of the city’s sites and buildings can be seen even over a relatively short period.

The vast majority of the city’s structures have long been unsafe. Former apartment buildings with no heating, some without windows and with holes in their roofs are quickly covered by moisture, which destroys even the strongest structures. Nature is doing its part as well. Many of Prypiat’s streets now look like continuous forest.

“We are probably one of the last generations, or the last generation, to see the same Prypiat. Sooner or later, the buildings will simply begin to collapse. Some large structures are already at risk of full collapse,” one former Prypiat resident who spent many years organizing tours of the city told NV.

In truth, the fact that Prypiat is still standing is almost a miracle. Even before the Revolution of Dignity, Dmytro Bobro, a former deputy head of the State Agency of Ukraine on Exclusion Zone Management, announced a large-scale dismantling of residential buildings. They were to be taken apart or even blown up, with the remains then buried under hazardous waste disposal rules.

“Most of these buildings will eventually be demolished and buried. The idea of turning the city into a museum is difficult to carry out. Inside the buildings, there is radiation — in some places higher than on the street. So as a museum, the dead city will exist for a maximum of 10 years. During that time, calculations show, the buildings will begin to collapse on their own,” Bobro told TSN in a 2012 interview.

Obviously, no such work will be done in Prypiat during the full-scale invasion. At the Polissia hotel on the central square, a large crack gapes almost across the entire building. The Energetik Palace of Culture, one of the city’s most recognizable symbols, looks worse every year. The local stadium is now so overgrown that almost nothing stands out except a lone grandstand in the middle of dense forest. It looks as if someone deliberately dropped it from the air into the thicket.

Tourists are not allowed into Prypiat now. The area is guarded by the military, and the attitude toward so-called stalkers — illegal visitors to the Zone — is much stricter than it once was, including because of the threat of sabotage groups crossing from Belarus.

Prypiat is spending its final years in near-total solitude.

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