Putin’s Chornobyl: a Régime That Will Not Permit the Wound to Heal

From the 2022 Red Forest trenches to the St. Valentine’s 2025 drone strike, the Kremlin’s war is a war on the truth of 1986 – and the men who buried that truth are now being decorated for it. Make us preferred on Google Share Facebook X (Twitter) LinkedIn Bluesky Email Copy Copied This photo shows the damaged containment vessel at the New Safe Confinement (NSC) at the former Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, following a drone attack on Feb. 14, 2025. (Photo by Tetiana DZHAFAROVA / AFP) Content Share Facebook X (Twitter) LinkedIn Bluesky Email Copy Copied Flip Make us preferred on Google I have never shared the following story. Not even with my wife. In January 1994, 45 minutes before I was to defend my doctoral dissertation at MIT, I locked myself in a room and wept. I had spent years on site reconstructing what really happened to Chornobyl Unit 4 after the initial explosions – what the Soviets had hidden, what the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had swallowed in 1986, and what the corium beneath the sarcophagus testified against the official record. Follow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official . Two videos of songs by Taras Petrynenko played as I sat there: “Чорнобильська Зона” (Chornobylska Zona) and “Господи, помилуй нас” (Hospody, Pomyluy Nas – Lord, Have Mercy on Us). I urge readers to find the Ukrainian originals. Translation cannot carry them. I thought the tears were cathartic enough: I was ready to defend my work. But the tears were not enough, for Chornobyl’s deceptions hung heavily on my mind and heart. Near the end of the defense, when I began to thank those who had helped me, I caught my wife’s eyes – she stood quietly at the back of the room, a wallflower at her own husband’s vindication – and I broke down a second time. She had borne more of those years than I had. The dedication was an act of lament fused with faith – grief not for myself but for an entire people. Long-suffering (Багатостраждальний – Bahatostrazhdalniy) is the Slavonic-liturgical epithet of Job. It belongs by right to the Ukrainian nation, whose suffering under communist totalitarianism culminated in a wound inscribed into soil, water, blood, and the fruit of the womb of generations not yet born. I shaped the dedication as a cascade. Read downward, it is fallout descending through the strata of being. Read upward, it is a tree rooted in suffering, rising through faith, opening at the top into a single Ukrainian word: зцілить ([God] shall heal). Other Topics of Interest Western-Made Components Discovered in Russian Drones Ukraine says Russian drones continue to contain newly manufactured Western components, underscoring ongoing sanctions and the need for tougher enforcement. The etymology sealed the symbolism. Chornobyl is the Ukrainian name for Artemisia vulgaris – mugwort – cognate with the wormwood of Revelation 8:11, whose falling star poisons the waters of the earth. The poisoned tree of the Apocalypse is answered by its antitype: the Tree of Life, whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. That was my prayer in 1994. Зцілить ([God] shall heal). Forty years on, the soil has not healed. The waters are not healed. The blood has not healed. And the reason is not radiation, since radioactivity decays. The reason is that the régime that inflicted the wound is still in power, still lying about it, and is now actively reopening it. In “Lord, Have Mercy on Us,” Petrynenko sang: “In our breasts, bullets and knives. We have been crucified and destroyed more than once.” This is not a poetic flourish. It is a forensic description. The crucifixion is iterated – 1921, 1932, 1937, 1945, 1986, 2014, 2022, 2025 – and the executioners have names. One of them is alive, decorated, and walking free in Moscow. The régime’s curriculum vitae Adamov is not a rogue figure. He is a perfect specimen. Every stage of his career maps onto a stage of the régime that produced him. He joined the Kurchatov Institute in 1965 and rose to deputy director. In 1986 – the year Reactor 4 exploded – he was appointed director of NIKIET, the institute that designed the RBMK. He replaced Nikolay Dollezhal, whose team had completed a confidential internal study in 1980, establishing that RBMK accidents were likely even during normal operation. The study sat in the Institute’s files. No corrective action was taken. Six years later, the reactor exploded exactly as the study had predicted. Dollezhal’s team, surveying the wreckage, washed its hands of the cleanup. “This is no longer a nuclear reactor,” they declared. “Our expertise is in nuclear reactors. Let others clean it up.” I documented their words in my 1996 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article, “Truth Was an Early Casualty.” Adamov directed NIKIET for 12 years. In 1998, Russian President Boris Yeltsin made him Minister for Atomic Energy. He sat on Russia’s Security Council. Then, in 2001, his successor Vladimir Putin dismissed him amid corruption investigations. In May 2005, the Swiss arrested him in Bern on a US warrant issued by the Western District of Pennsylvania. He had diverted some $9 million in US funds intended to upgrade the security of aging Russian reactors – money entrusted to him to prevent another Chornobyl – much of which he pocketed. Russia and the US both demanded extradition. The Swiss Supreme Court ruled in favor of Russia. Western reporters wrote at the time that Moscow’s furious effort to recover Adamov was driven less by the desire to prosecute him than by the desire to prevent him from telling Washington what he knew. In February 2008, a Moscow district court convicted him of fraud and abuse of office – a term of five and a half years. Two months later, the Moscow City Court “revised” the sentence to four years of probation and released him, 20 before Putin handed the presidency to Dmitry Medvedev. Sixteen years later, on June 10, 2024, Putin signed Executive Order No. 472, awarding Adamov the State Prize of the Russian Federation in Science and Technology. The citation honors his work – together with Vladimir Asmolov – on what the Kremlin calls the world’s first “nature-like” nuclear power system, employing the “radiation-equivalent principle of radioactive waste management.” The man who came of age at Kurchatov, directed the institute that designed the RBMK, presided over 12 years of cover-up, looted American nuclear-safety funds, and was extradited to Moscow precisely so he would not testify in the West, has been decorated by the president of Russia for environmentally responsible stewardship of nuclear waste. The cynicism is total. It is the régime’s self-portrait. From the Red Forest to St. Valentine’s Day The régime has not stopped. It is iterating. On Feb. 24, 2022, Russian armored columns crossed from Belarus into Ukraine and seized Chornobyl on the war’s first day. They drove tanks through the Red Forest – the most contaminated stretch of the exclusion zone – kicking up clouds of radioactive dust. Their soldiers wore no protective gear. Most appear not to have known where they were. They dug trenches and foxholes into soil that even Chornobyl’s own workers are forbidden to enter. Within days, the panic began. Buses carried Russian conscripts to a radiation hospital in Gomel, in Belarus. At least one died. The régime that lied to the world about Chornobyl in 1986 had, in 2022, lied to its own soldiers about Chornobyl. There is a precedent: in 1954, at the Totskoye nuclear exercise, the Red Army marched thousands of men through ground zero after a live nuclear blast. The medical records were never released. The pattern is older than the régime; the régime is its faithful heir. At 1:50 a.m. on Feb. 14, 2025 – St. Valentine’s Day – a Russian Shahed-136 drone (Russian designation Geran-2) struck the New Safe Confinement, the $2.1 billion archlike shelter completed in 2019 to seal the destroyed reactor for the next century. The drone punched through the outer cladding, breached the inner cladding, and ignited a fire that firefighters’ efforts left riddled with some 300 smaller holes. Moscow denied responsibility. The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) recovered fragments of the drone. The New York Times, citing British military analysis, judged the strike “almost certainly deliberate.” The IAEA Director General, Rafael Grossi, confirmed in December 2025 that the New Safe Confinement had “lost its primary safety functions, including its confinement capability.” The agency that swallowed Soviet lies in 1986 has now formally certified the Russian breach of 2025. Eight months later, on Oct. 1, 2025, Russian airstrikes on Slavutych – the town built in 1986 to house Chornobyl’s workers – cut power to the New Safe Confinement for three hours. President Volodymyr Zelensky stated what was obvious: the strike was designed to manufacture a nuclear incident. This is not collateral damage. It is a method. Look again at the dissertation dedication’s four strata – soil, water, blood, the fruit of the womb. The régime’s iteration desecrates each in turn. Soil: trenches in the Red Forest. Water: the cooling pond and the boggy Pripyat River were compromised, and the radioactive dust was airborne. Blood: Russian conscripts sent unprotected into contamination, as Soviet soldiers were marched through Totskoye. Progeny: a Shahed-136 punching the sarcophagus, on St. Valentine’s Day, against the inheritance of generations not yet born. Meanwhile, in Moscow, the architects of the original lie are not in prison. They are on the dais. The wound is not healing because the régime will not let it. The men who designed the reactor, who buried the truth, who looted the funds intended to prevent the next disaster – these men have not been retired. They have been promoted. The cover-up of 1986 and the war of 2022 are the same régime’s same project, executed by the same caste, all decorated by the same hand. Western governments speak of “peace negotiations.” The Kremlin sent a Shahed into the New Safe Confinement on the eve of the Munich Security Conference. That was its answer. Western institutions speak of “engaging Russian science.” The Kremlin awarded its State Prize to a convicted fraudster who diverted American nuclear-safety dollars. That was its answer. Forty years of credulity have produced 40 years of escalation. I wrote in my dedication that I trusted God to heal His children’s bodies and their land through their spiritual rebirth. I still trust this. But spiritual rebirth has political consequences, among them the refusal to remain credulous toward those who use our credulity as a weapon. Chornobyl was wormwood once. It is wormwood again. The poison is still falling. The régime is still pouring it. And to those in the West who can still act: open your eyes – while there is still time. English translation of the dedication to the long-suffering Ukrainian nation – victim of a criminal communist régime in the blood of the present and in the fruit of the womb of future generations the radioactive trace of the Chornobyl accident; that God has not forsaken His children and that through their spiritual rebirth He shall heal their bodies and their land. The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily of Kyiv Post. Alexander Sich holds a PhD. in Nuclear Engineering from MIT and an MA in Soviet Studies from Harvard. He authored the Chornobyl chapter in the “Encyclopedia of Nuclear Energy” and was the first Western nuclear engineer permitted to live and work with the Russian and Ukrainian scientists studying the destroyed reactor inside the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, where he spent 18 months conducting research underpinning this article.