Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster

by Adam Higginbotham

His invocation complete, Poroshenko launched into a speech, carried live on national television, to mark exactly thirty years since the disaster. He spoke of the accident’s catalytic role in Ukrainian independence and the breakup of the USSR and placed it on the continuum of events that threatened the state’s very existence, halfway between the Great Patriotic War and the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014. He described the enduring costs of the accident, the 115,000 people he said would never return to their homes in the Exclusion Zone, the 2.5 million more living on land contaminated by radionuclides, and the hundreds of thousands of disabled Chernobyltsi who continued to require support from the state and society. “The issue of the aftermath of the catastrophe is still open,” he said. “Its heavy burden lay on the shoulders of the Ukrainian people, and we are, unfortunately, still very far from overcoming it for good.”