them. Brukhanov—along with four other senior members of the plant staff, including Dyatlov and Fomin—was charged formally under Article 220, paragraph 2, of the Ukrainian Criminal Code, under which he was accused of “a breach of safety regulations” resulting in loss of life or other serious consequences at “explosion-prone plants or facilities.” This was an inventive legal gambit—never before had Soviet jurists considered a nuclear power station an installation likely to explode—and the first of many logical contortions necessary to confine responsibility for the accident to the handful of
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