Inside Chornobyl Exclusion Zone: Przewalski’s horses, Red Forest, and Pripyat

In the end, the warnings proved groundless. One of the many tour guides who accompanied us throughout that long day said that, in 20 years of work, he had never seen a single case in which tourists had their clothing or belongings taken away.

By the way, since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, tourists have been banned from visiting the Zone because it is likely mined by the Russian occupiers. Stalkers have also started coming here much less often. The real ones — not those from the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video game — understand the danger. After all, there are not only mines; the adventurers themselves could be mistaken for hostile sabotage groups.

For now, only journalists are allowed into the Zone. We will share with you the most interesting places shown.

Entire village buried underground

I was 10 years old when the Chornobyl nuclear power plant accident happened. I remember almost nothing except that the following year, my parents sent me to a pioneer camp in the forest north of Kyiv. So, while living in the south of Kyiv Oblast, I went for “rehabilitation” closer to the contaminated zone. Of course, my parents did not know about the effects of radiation because that information was suppressed.

And now, as I am traveling to Chornobyl — the first stop of our press tour, 110 kilometers from Kyiv — I imagined that I would fall into a time hole and that the town would remind me of the times of my Soviet childhood. But no. The town is functioning, and the multi-story apartment buildings look exactly like those in which half the country still lives. Modern cars are parked around. The central street is active, the park is cleaned up, and stores are open. The only thing that remains is that the streets still bear their old names: Soviet Street, 25 Years of October, Karl Marx Street.

Today, Chornobyl is the center of the Exclusion Zone, with enterprises subordinated to the State Agency of Ukraine for the Management of the Exclusion Zone. About 3,000 shift workers live here, 500 of them at the nuclear power plant itself. They reside in the town. In addition, there are about 40 self-settlers. These are former residents of these lands who returned in different years after the accident.

We stop near the monument to the Trumpeting Angel. It symbolizes the words of the Apostle John the Theologian, who in the New Testament prophesied about an Angel who sounds the trumpet about God’s punishments during the end of the world. There is the star Wormwood, another name for which is Chornobyl, which will fall on the rivers like a torch. And the water will become bitter, and many people will die. In theology, this image is interpreted as a symbol of a large-scale ecological or spiritual catastrophe that will bring suffering to humanity. It is supposedly referring to the Chornobyl disaster.

Beyond the Angel stretches an alley that seems to have no end, with plaques on black posts. They bear the names of 162 towns, villages, and settlements that have disappeared from the maps, their residents evacuated. Some settlements were literally buried in the ground, like the village of Kopachi. It is only four kilometers from the reactor.

Natalia Khodymchuk, the wife of Valeriy Khodemchuk — the first liquidator killed in the Chornobyl nuclear power plant accident — comes from there. The woman was killed by a Russian drone last November.

After the explosion at the power plant, radioactive dust penetrated all the buildings, got into every crack, and settled in a thick layer on surfaces. Every item was emitting radiation so intensely that it was decided that Kopachi would be buried. Literally, underground. The buildings were demolished. They left only the monument to the fallen fellow villagers from World War II, the farm, the village council building, and the kindergarten. There are still iron beds, toys, and children’s dishes on the tables. It is as if the children were there just a moment ago — and then suddenly vanished.

The Red Forest is no longer red

The Red Forest, one of the most contaminated areas in the Chornobyl Zone, is no longer red at all. After the accident, it was named that way because the pine needles turned brick red. The trees glowed in the dark. They were bulldozed and buried, and a new forest grew in their place. A green one.

“Look to the left, we will see wild Przewalski’s horses soon,” says Nadiia Mudryk-Mochalova, head of the department for ensuring visits to the Exclusion Zone, who is accompanying us. The bus brakes. Several horses are grazing not far from the road; farther away, a herd with a white foal is visible. When the journalists pour out onto the road with their cameras, the animals move away.

A few animals were originally brought from the now occupied Askania-Nova in southern Ukraine; now there are over a hundred of them.

Nadiia says she has seen a lynx in these forests twice. There are also wolves, foxes, raccoon dogs, moose, deer, black storks, and a herd of feral cows. A camera trap recorded a brown bear. And that means the ecosystem has recovered.

“Last year I saw a wild boar here — it stood in the middle of the road, I barely managed to brake,” a colleague says. “It did not move until the whole herd of about forty animals had crossed.”

What is interesting is that, contrary to initial predictions that the animals would die off en masse, their numbers have increased, and rare species have returned. Life without people has boosted recovery despite the radiation.

In 2022, the Russian occupiers dug trenches and set up checkpoints in the Red Forest and ate there. But drinking, eating, placing anything on the ground, or sitting on it is strictly prohibited throughout the Zone. Because of radioactive contamination that is hundreds of times above the norm, the soldiers received heavy doses of radiation, and many of them died or suffered from serious illnesses, including infertility.

“Whoever falls, we will bury them here”

At the Chornobyl nuclear power plant itself, we removed our own clothes and changed into what was issued: socks, shoes, two cotton suits, a cap, a hard hat, a respirator, and gloves. Each of us was given a dosimeter. Radiation levels were measured in microsieverts (a unit of radiation). The harmful level starts at 100 mSv (the device should have beeped, warning that I was in danger), and the lethal level starts at 5,000 mSv. My highest reading was 9. And that was near the fourth reactor. As the plant workers joked, “The radiation on Khreshchatyk is higher.”

The Chornobyl nuclear power plant has not produced electricity since 2000. It now operates as a scientific and engineering site, with the main goal of decommissioning and transforming the “Shelter” object into an environmentally safe system.

The plant consists of hundreds of meters of corridors and pipes. We are checked repeatedly. The most interesting part is the control room panel of the fourth reactor. It was from here that the largest man-made catastrophe in human history began. One of the station’s employees shows the place where the AZ-5 button was located. It is also called the “red button” for emergency reactor shutdown. Overnight into April 26, 1986, they were testing one of the design safety systems. The test failed, and the operator pressed the button. (It is interesting that it had to be held for as long as 18 seconds. Later, toggles were installed instead of buttons in all control rooms — editor’s note.) It worked in the opposite way — it did not stop the reactor but sharply accelerated it. An explosion occurred that destroyed the reactor.

The control room remained intact in 1986, but during the firefighting, it was flooded.

It is now dark and cold here. The control panels have been destroyed by time because the rooms have not been touched for 40 years. You can stay in the control room for only a few minutes because it is considered “dirty.” You are not allowed to touch anything here, and if someone drops a hard hat or anything else, it must not be picked up until a radiologist checks it with a dosimeter.

The journalists joke: What if one of us falls?

“We will bury them right here,” the staff says, chuckling.

An arch that could cover the Colosseum

The incredible thing that is definitely worth visiting the Chornobyl nuclear power plant for is the containment arch that was slid over the old emergency sarcophagus covering the fourth reactor in 2016. The arch is designed to protect the environment from radiation leaks for the next hundred years. It is 109 meters high and large enough to cover the Colosseum and the Statue of Liberty.

It is impressive both on the outside and inside, with an observation deck. You can see the Sarcophagus, under which approximately 200 tons of radioactive materials are hidden, including uranium and plutonium.

On the “ceiling” above us, they showed a white “patch” — the spot where a Russian drone hit on February 14 of last year. It is only a few dozen meters from the Sarcophagus.

The journalists asked the plant workers what would happen if another drone or something dangerous hit the protective structures and destroyed them.

The answer: “a second Chornobyl.” A possible restraining factor for the enemies is that Belarus — Russia’s partner — is only 11 kilometers away.

An adventure that makes your heart freeze

When I had already decided that the most interesting part was behind us, we were taken to Pripyat. Large letters of the name greet visitors at the entrance.

The city existed for only 16 years and 82 days. It was built in 1970 for workers of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant. The average age of residents did not exceed 26 years. Young people from all over the Soviet Union came here; apartments were given to specialists. Pripyat was considered a model city, constantly visited by foreign delegations. They were shown how well the Soviet people lived. And it really was comfortable here: modern buildings, movie theaters, culture and recreation palaces, sports complexes. There was a railway station and a river port. At the time of the accident, nearly 50,000 people lived here, one-third of them children. Pripyat was called the City of Roses because there was a plan to plant as many rose bushes as there were residents. They managed to plant 30,000. Now they have all turned into wild rose hips.

People were evacuated for “two or three” days; they did not know they were leaving their city forever. They were not allowed to take animals because fur was allegedly contaminated with radiation. For a long time afterward, hungry howling hung over the city.

We arrive at the center. We have only an hour and a half for an independent tour. The media workers scatter in different directions. I stay alone.

And I step into a horror movie. It is broad daylight, there is greenery, fruit trees are blooming here and there, and the sun sometimes breaks through, but my skin crawls with cold. There are no usual city sounds: no cars, no noise, no voices. Only the wind. It lifts last year’s leaves and swirls them into vortices, creating the feeling that someone is creeping up behind you. Somewhere, loose doors creak, broken window panes jingle, half-torn signs and sheets of tin bang, and empty dwellings hum. This is even scarier than the explosions we have gotten used to in recent years. I realize it is because of the place's strangeness. Buildings, cafes, stores, schools — everything is swallowed by such dense overgrowth that you cannot push through it. And touching anything here, including vegetation, is prohibited anyway.

I enter a courtyard where the entrances of four buildings face. I see only two; I can only guess about the rest. Trees have not only swallowed the space — they have fallen, blocking and destroying everything around them, including the playground. Or maybe it was a sports ground? I dare to enter what was once a beautiful stairwell, where the stairs crumble underfoot. In the two-room apartment, there is nothing; the walls are peeling.

At one moment, a sticky fear overtakes me: if a person, an animal, or some evil force suddenly jumps out right now — I have nothing. My backpack with the knife is in the bus. And I cannot pick up any sticks for self-defense, as the area is considered highly contaminated. I bolt out of the building like a bat out of hell.

Public places look exactly as in the numerous photos online: Soviet posters in the House of Culture, a hammer and sickle on a pole, scattered dust-covered books on school desks. They are open to pages mentioning Lenin or Heroes of the Soviet Union. Everything is in Russian. Sometimes these things are arranged too artificially, too deliberately for photographers: a doll and an abacus on one desk, dried jars of paint on another, the Constitution of the USSR on a third.

I also saw the world-famous amusement park with its rusty carousels, bumper cars, and Ferris wheel. On the roofs of some buildings, there are still metal coats of arms of Soviet Ukraine and the USSR, or slogans written in huge letters: “Let the atom be a worker, not a soldier.”

My phone dies, and I have wandered who knows where. There are sewer pits without covers everywhere. If I fall in, no one will ever find me!

I practically run back to the bus. Whew, there it is — though I can see it only when I am almost right next to it. My heart is pounding from the eerie feeling and the fascination of what I have seen.

Already on the bus, my colleagues share various personal stories: when former residents were allowed to visit their native city, one family did repairs in their apartment every year and hung new wallpaper. Someone went to clean graves, others gathered with neighbors to reminisce about peaceful times: how they kissed in the movie theater or how they hid from adults to drink wine.

For me, visiting Pripyat is an adventure and a new experience. For thousands of people, it was home — a home they can never return to.