On Ukraine’s Belarus border, a city born from Chernobyl prepares for another Russian attack

At the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Russian forces seized the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and advanced into Ukraine from Belarus. Slavutych spent nearly a week without electricity. For a city whose infrastructure depends almost entirely on power, even household stoves are electric -  the blackout was a serious challenge. Local residents cooked food on open fires in their courtyards. Grocery stores ran out of supplies within days.

The Belarusian border is less than six kilometers away as the crow flies. Russian troops surrounded the city, effectively cutting it off from the rest of Ukraine. Food and fuel had to be brought in using little-known forest roads attended mostly by local mushroom pickers, and perhaps the occasional moose. Residents of nearby villages helped choose the safest route each time, monitoring Russian troop movements along the way. Inside Slavutych, humanitarian aid was distributed according to strict lists: every resident was assigned a specific time to collect a package.

With concerns once again growing over the possibility of a renewed Russian offensive from Belarus, our journalists traveled to Slavutych to see how the city lives nowadays.

Shelters with windows

We arrived in the evening, and the silence was striking. There were only a handful of people on the streets, no voices, almost none of the usual sounds of a city.

Several air raid alerts sounded overnight, but photographer Olena and I waited in vain outside one of the shelters for residents to show up.

“At the beginning of the war, people actively went to shelters. Now everyone has relaxed - myself included,” said Nataliia Kostynok, deputy head of the Crocus Gymnasium school, the following morning.

The shelter beneath the school feels almost like an underground village. It has classrooms where lessons can continue during alerts, as well as a kitchen, showers, toilets, water supplies and sleeping spaces for children and adults. Accessible bathrooms have been installed, and a lift for people with limited mobility is now being added. During blackouts, the shelter also serves as one of Ukraine’s so-called “resilience points” - heated public spaces where residents can charge devices, get online and access basic services during prolonged power outages. There are nine such centers in Slavutych, a city of around 20 000 people. The largest is located beneath the city’s cinema and concert hall.

The Crocus school shelter can hold 1200 people. Around 250 children attend the school, meaning that when classes or extracurricular activities are not taking place, there is theoretically room for almost 1,000 other residents.

Similar shelters have been prepared in all eight of Slavutych’s educational institutions.

Officially, the city has 56 shelters. That sounds impressive for a population of 20 000. But basically they are simply basements beneath apartment blocks - some of them grandly designated as “radiation shelters” in Soviet times.

“No one could have imagined that the day would come when these basements would actually be needed as bomb shelters,” says Vadym Zui, head of emergency management and civil protection at Slavutych City Council.

We enter one of the shelters. The staircase is steep and narrow, with sharp turns. It is hard to imagine how someone in a wheelchair could get down here, or even a parent with a baby stroller.

 Inside, there is a long, narrow corridor with several benches along the walls.

Petro, who lives in the building, says around 50 people could fit comfortably. At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, as many as 200 crowded inside. Families and neighbors would even carry bedridden residents downstairs. They no longer do - people are less afraid now, Petro says. He himself stays inside his apartment during alerts, covering behind two walls.

With the help from the city authorities, residents  have installed a toilet and washbasin in the basement. There is even a fresh bar of soap beside the sink. In one corner sit a crowbar and a sledgehammer - reassuring, in their own way. They are there in case an explosion blocks the shelter’s only exit.

Much of the basement is occupied by residents’ storage rooms. And those rooms have windows. So how much of a shelter is it really?  Water, sewage and heating pipes run throughout the basement. If the building were hit and the pipes burst, what would happen to the people hiding below?

In early 2026, following a lawsuit by the Kyiv regional prosecutor’s office, a court ordered Slavutych City Council to formally take responsibility for 31 such basements.

According to Zui, thousands of square meters of basement space, that could theoretically shelter almost the entire city, exist as shelters largely on paper. In reality, they still need to be converted.

“We have already inspected several of these basements and plan to prepare the design and cost documentation needed to turn them into proper shelters,” he says.

And all of this is happening nearly five years into the full-scale war and just a few kilometers from Belarus…

Food, heat and electricity

Back in 2022, after the supply shortages were over, Slavutych authorities decided to create a strategic food reserve. But that created another problem.

“Sooner or later, food reaches its expiration date,” Mayor Fomichev says. “We had to throw expired supplies away and replace them with fresh ones. Then we came up with another solution.”

The city reached an agreement with local supermarkets. Emergency food stocks are stored there. When the products approach their expiration date, shops put them on sale and replace them in the city reserve with fresh supplies.

“In fact, we exchange them,” Fomichev says. “That way, we don’t end up accumulating spoiled food.”

Keeping the city’s aging infrastructure functioning is harder. Slavutych’s utility networks were laid around 40 years ago, when the city was built, and many are now well beyond their intended service life. Yurii Yehorenko, director of the municipal heating company Slavutych-Teplomerezhi, says the utility previously received an average of around 15 requests a year to repair electrical cables. In the first six months of this year alone, there were already 32 repairs

“It’s all because of the cold winter, which increased the pressure on the system, and because of frequent power cuts across Ukraine and in the Chernihiv region in particular,” Yehorenko says. Slavutych receives electricity through the neighboring Chernihiv region.

“The networks were designed to be switched off and back on maybe two or four times a year for maintenance,” he says. “When they operate continuously, they are fine. But there were days when we had to switch them off six times. And they’re old.”

The water utility’s equipment is just as outdated. For instance, its filtration station, built in the 1980s, was based on a design dating from 1967.The problems of this aging engineering infrastructure have now been compounded by war. Volodymyr Shulha, head of the municipal water company Slavutych-Vodokanal, says keeping the system running is especially difficult during blackouts.

“That’s when we switch to diesel generators,” he says. “We have enough diesel fuel for up to five days.” Even during the week-long blackout in March 2022, the utility continued supplying water and processing sewage. It also has two water storage tanks, each holding 5000 cubic meters. The entire city currently consumes up to 3 000 cubic meters a day. “So even if a Shahed drone suddenly hit our equipment, the city would still have water for several days, giving us time to carry out repairs,” Shulha says. “Throughout the war, Slavutych has never been without water for more than half a day. None of our facilities has been hit since the start of the war. But the situation is worrying: some of our infrastructure is only four kilometers from the Belarusian border.”

The water intake is heavily guarded. Its pumping stations also have their own “sarcophagi” - protective structures made of gabions, metal cages filled with stone and sand mixture to shield equipment from the attacks.

Despite the aging infrastructure, Yehorenko says Slavutych has so far managed to keep homes heated. Service is sometimes interrupted for an hour or two while the system is reconfigured, but heat remains available. The city is now using grant funding to install individual heating substations, replace sections of the heating network and modernize equipment. The aim is to reduce heat loss and improve energy efficiency.

According to Fomichev, the city also wants to install thermal batteries that could store heat and feed it back into the network when needed. Plans include launching a biomass boiler plant that would produce both heat and electricity, as well as installing a heat pump capable of turning solar energy into heat with the help of battery storage. The goal is simple: prevent residents from having to leave the city because there is no heat.

“Sarcophagi” for substations

Slavutych’s emergency services do not have their own heavy equipment for clearing collapsed buildings. If the city were subjected to a major attack, rescue crews would have to wait for help from colleagues in Chernihiv.

So far, Slavutych has avoided large-scale bombardment. According to Yevhen Skrypka, head of the city’s emergency service, Shahed drones have directly attacked the city only a couple of times since the start of the full-scale invasion. Yet the number of emergency call-outs has nearly tripled: Russia is striking Ukraine more intensively lately, and missiles and drones heading toward Chernihiv or Kyiv are sometimes intercepted over Slavutych. Falling debris can then start fires.

“Once, debris containing an unexploded warhead fell onto someone’s balcony in the residential district,” Skrypka says. “There were 50 kilograms of explosives in it. We had to evacuate the entire apartment building for several hours while bomb disposal specialists worked. But most often, the Russians try to hit our energy infrastructure.”

The most damaging attack came on October 1, 2025, when Russia struck a 330-kilovolt electrical substation. Slavutych was without electricity for several days, with disruptions to heating and water supplies.

The substation is operated by Ukraine’s national power grid company, Ukrenergo, so Fomichev cannot answer why construction of protective structures around it began only after it had already been hit.

Another city substation, a smaller 110/10-kilovolt facility operated by the regional electricity company Chernihivoblenergo, has been luckier. Shahed drones have not destroyed it. One drone struck the excavation pit for its protective structure in January 2026. Another hit the protective wall in June.

The impact badly damaged the wall but failed to penetrate it. Workers are now repairing the structure. They laugh when I ask who protects them while they are building protection for the substation.

Photographer Olena takes pictures of Shahed debris still lying almost under the workers’ feet as I carefully make my way inside the protective structure. I am not normally a fan of industrial landscapes, but the monumental scale of the substation is strangely mesmerizing.

“I brought this transformer here and installed it in 1987,” says engineer Oleksii Babych, now 72 and still working. “We’re lucky the Shaheds didn’t hit it. Slavutych would have been in serious trouble. This transformer effectively supplies the entire city.”

Back in 2019, when the city’s civil defense headquarters conducted an exercise on restoring the electricity supply, energy specialists said Slavutych simply could not lose power.They were wrong. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, the city has experienced repeated blackouts. That forced local authorities to confront the need for alternative sources of electricity.

Today, every municipal facility, supermarket and pharmacy in Slavutych has its own generator. Some, including the hospital, have two. Solar panels are also becoming more common. The water utility company is currently installing a solar power plant powerful enough to keep it operating for at least ten hours without generators if diesel supplies run out.

Slavutych already generates some of its own electricity from solar and other sources. Its longer-term ambition is more ambitious still: to create its own “energy island”, allowing the city to meet all of its electricity needs independently during blackouts.

“We had four blackouts last winter alone,” Fomichev says.”When the substation was hit on October 1, we worked for four days just to restore some power supply to the city. If we had an energy island, Slavutych could simply have continued generating electricity for itself using gas-fired generation and solar power. That is the model we are aiming toward.”

People coming and going

As elsewhere in Ukraine, the war has deepened Slavutych’s shortage of skilled workers needed to maintain critical infrastructure. Some specialists have been mobilized into the armed forces. Others have left the city.

The water utility company needs around 140 workers but has only 105. The municipal heating company is operating at roughly 75% staffing. The emergency services are short of personnel as well.

“Even exemptions from military mobilization for critical workers are not enough to recruit all the specialists we need to keep critical infrastructure running,” Yehorenko says.

The city is therefore trying to attract highly qualified internally displaced Ukrainians who could replace some of the specialists who have left.

And people are indeed moving here - to a city only kilometers from Belarus. More than 1000 internally displaced people now live in Slavutych.

“They come because we have housing for them,” Fomichev says. “This year we converted several municipal properties into around 100 apartments. And we have jobs for them.”

I asked everyone I spoke to in Slavutych the same question: Do you believe Russia could attack again from Belarus?

The answer was almost always the same: “We are getting ready for the worst”.

This material was produced with the support of the Partnership for a Strong Ukraine program, a multi-donor initiative funded by the governments of the United Kingdom, Estonia, Canada, Norway, Finland, Switzerland and Sweden. The program aims to strengthen Ukraine’s resilience in the face of Russian aggression by providing critical support to communities in collaboration with Ukrainian government authorities, civil society, media and the private sector.