“The Russians will not come back here” – Corriere.it

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Ivankiv (Chernobyl) – Do not guard anywhere, in a forest of birch and alder trees covered with snow. To protect no one, near the demolished houses. To defend an untouchable homeland: it is untouchable, because it is better not to touch it at all. under the inscriptionChernobyl tours. finger on trigger; Besides, we don’t go. Since December, the road has been closed. There is a Belarus there. And about ten kilometers ago, it was reactor. An encirclement of 75,000 soldiers patrolling a distance of 1,100 kilometers from the border. 145 square kilometers of restricted area. Especially the post-atomic Pompeii that the world would like to forget, but which no Ukrainian can ignore. “It does not matter whether it is a desert or a polluted area,” the Minister of Defense ordered: “This is also Ukraine. There are a thousand reasons why the Russians have not set foot in it again.”

Dying for Chernobyl? after? Thirty-five years later, there were thyroid tumors and homeless people, babies and cleft thorns, radiating deer and two-headed wild boars, acres of redwoods, and millions afflicted with the worst kind of atomic leprosy. This is the first global environmental emergency. And the explosion that was 500 times more powerful than Hiroshima… why would he die? So far we have lived quite a bit, if nothing else. With visits at a safe distance from the famous 4 Lenin reactor. With the Museum of Tristanzolo on the outskirts of Kiev and the memorial to the victims of it April 26, 1986. With the Chernobyl tour that attracts every year 100,000 horror tourists, eager to wear special screens, which can be measured with Geiger, to enter places of prosperity. Everything is over. The call to arms against the Russian invasion, if any, affects every corner of the country. This also: “Putin’s aggression could be a disaster like Chernobyl – warns the Ukrainian ambassador in London, Vadim Pristelko -. After France, we are the second country with nuclear power plants: if something happens, I would like to remember Chernobyl. And for the fact that we will fight to the death….”

The most ridiculous fights. As it happens, Chernobyl means “black grass”: today only a few lunatics manage to enter the exclusion zone who sneak into the ruined homes of Pripyat at night, a few kilometers from the reactor, steal tainted souvenirs, radioactive metals, and sell them on the Internet . It would be impossible to survive on the black grass for the next three thousand years. In 2016, the Americans and 45 countries cemented the concrete stone sarcophagus One billion dollars has slowly eroded over decades: it should last for at least another century and prevent the remnants of the radioactive core – liquid lava that burns at a thousand degrees and can kill anyone exposed to it for more than five minutes – from penetrating the air or sinking into aquifers. Chernobyl remains an indispensable symbol of Soviet disasters: Covered with plants and miraculously re-inhabited by animals, the Ukrainians asked UNESCO to declare it a world heritage site.

And not just for its ecological advancement: the devastated power plant is the finger that always points to Moscow. No one in the Kremlin – except for the Chinese with Covid – took responsibility for the censorship imposed at the time. Not even GorbachevWho was the PCUS secretary. In 2009, the secret documents of the US Politburo were published: a massive cover-up and alterations to reality.

Why would such a place be of interest to the Russians? Instead of digging trenches, as they say in Kiev, walls should be raised: “From Belarus, their friend Lukashenko plans to flood us with Syrian immigrants, as he did on the Polish border.” In February, Lukashenko and Putin conducted joint military exercises just across the Chernobyl border. Black grass never dies.