In this building, the Ukrainian employees of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant had to live and sleep for several weeks.
The Russians took control of the factory on February 24 and colleagues living outside the factory were only allowed to enter and replace the exhausted workers on March 20.
He writes CNN Who went to the nuclear power plant and spoke to those who work there.
Conditions were even worse for the 169 Ukrainian soldiers of the National Guard, who took care of the facility. They must have been trapped in the subterranean mound of a nuclear power plant since the Cold War days.
They were held here for 30 days without adequate light or food. They were not allowed to go outdoors. On the last day, they were taken from here to an unknown location, Ukrainian Interior Minister Denis Monastirsky told CNN while standing inside the bunker.
Below the basement of the main building of the nuclear power plant, there are dormitories that have been fully inspected, writes BBC.
The floor is full of blankets, mattresses, clothes, shoes and other personal belongings of the Ukrainian National Guard that are kept there. Chernobyl officials say the Russian soldiers looted as much as they could when they left, and also took captured National Guard members with them.
Interior Minister Denis Monastirsky says he believes the men were taken to Russia, via Belarus, as prisoners of war.
– He says that today, unfortunately, we do not know anything about their fate. In early April, Russian forces withdrew from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, after controlling the area for more than a month.
The Minister of the Interior added that the Russian soldiers searched the property of Ukrainian soldiers “like dogs”, and also stole computers and other technical equipment.
Many foreign media have claimed that Russian soldiers have fallen exposed to radioactive radiation While in Chernobyl.
The soldiers are said to have been exposed to dangerous radiation while excavating the trenches at Den Rudi Skogen, among other things. The forest got its name when most of the trees there died after the reactor accident in 1986.
according to The New York Times The Russian soldiers reportedly spent several weeks inside the radioactive forest. The Red Forest remains the most nuclear-contaminated area on the planet.
“We did not ask them to do this, they said it was dangerous, but they ignored us,” Valery Semyonov, chief security engineer at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant told the newspaper.
Soldiers are said to have trampled on the area with tanks and bulldozers, digging trenches and bunkers – exposing themselves to potentially harmful doses of radiation falling underground.
However, the International Atomic Energy Agency wrote in an April 1 press release that it was unable to verify reports that Russian soldiers had suffered radioactive damage. However, health problems associated with exposure to radiation can appear decades later.
According to CNN, there is now a higher level of radioactivity in the room in which Russian soldiers lived during their occupation of the nuclear power plant. Ukrainian officials say the soldiers took radioactive material in their shoes after they were in the “red forest”.
– They went to the Red Forest and got radioactive material on the shoes, says soldier Ihor Ogolkov.
Other places are fine, but the radioactivity increased here where they lived, he adds.
But the radioactivity is not very high, just a little higher than what the World Nuclear Association, an international organization representing the world’s nuclear energy industry, describes as natural radiation. Only constant exposure is dangerous to health.
In addition to the decommissioned Chernobyl reactors, Ukraine has four active nuclear power plants, including Europe’s largest nuclear power plant in Zaporizhia. This facility was occupied by the Russian army in early March, when it took control of the area.
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