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On the 40th anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe, a wave of reciprocal drone and missile strikes across Ukraine, Russian-occupied territories and mainland Russia has left at least 16 people dead, amplifying urgent global warnings about nuclear risks stemming from more than two years of Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

In southern Ukraine’s Dnipro, regional governor Oleksandr Hanzha announced Sunday that the death toll from recent Russian drone and missile attacks on the city climbed to nine. Cross-border strikes have extended into Russian-held areas as well: Moscow-appointed officials in Sevastopol, the main port on the annexed Crimean Peninsula, reported one fatality from a Ukrainian drone strike. Since Russia’s 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea, the peninsula has functioned as a key military staging and supply hub for Russian forces in the ongoing war. Further north, in Russia-claimed Luhansk Oblast of eastern Ukraine, Moscow-installed leader Leonidypasechnik stated three civilians were killed in an overnight Ukrainian drone attack on a rural village, following two deaths from a separate strike in the same region early Saturday. Ukraine has not issued official comment on any of these strikes against Russian-held territory, and the details of the attacks could not be independently verified by the Associated Press.

The streak of cross-border attacks preceded these fatal incidents: Russian local authorities reported one woman killed in a Ukrainian drone strike on the border region of Belgorod just days prior. On Sunday, Ukraine’s General Staff confirmed it had targeted a major oil refinery in Yaroslavl, a facility located hundreds of kilometers inside Russian territory. The strike ignited large fires at the refinery, which processes 15 million tons of crude annually and supplies gasoline, diesel and jet fuel directly to the Russian military. Moscow has not yet released an official response to the Yaroslavl attack.

Kyiv’s expanded long-range strike capability is rooted in its domestically produced drone program, which has developed systems capable of reaching targets 1,500 kilometers deep into Russian territory. In recent weeks, Ukraine has repeatedly targeted Russian energy infrastructure, particularly oil processing facilities. These strikes come after the Trump administration granted Russia a temporary sanctions waiver to boost energy exports, a move Kyiv has openly criticized, arguing that the additional export revenue will be funneled into new military weapons to intensify attacks on Ukraine.

The flurry of attacks coincided with global commemorations of the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, drawing renewed attention to the ongoing threat of nuclear catastrophe at the abandoned plant. In his official address marking the anniversary, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that Russian military aggression risks repeating the 1986 disaster. “Through its war, Russia is once again bringing the world to the brink of a man-made disaster,” Zelenskyy wrote on Facebook. “Russian-Iranian Shahed drones regularly fly over the Chernobyl plant, and one of them struck the confinement structure last year.” He added, “The world must not allow this nuclear terrorism to continue, and the best way is to force Russia to stop its reckless attacks.”

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi echoed these warnings during a visit to Kyiv, stressing that urgent repairs to the plant’s damaged outer protective shell must begin without delay. Grossi noted that IAEA safety assessments confirm damage from last year’s strike has already compromised a core safety function of the structure. Leaving the damage unrepaired for years, he warned, would increase risks to the original reinforced sarcophagus that contains radioactive debris from the 1986 reactor explosion. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has estimated that critical repairs will cost at least 500 million euros ($586 million).

Ukrainian officials say a Russian drone struck the New Safe Confinement, a $2.1 billion arch-shaped protective enclosure completed in 2019 over the ruins of Chernobyl’s Reactor No.4, in February 2024. Moscow has repeatedly denied targeting the plant, claiming Kyiv staged the incident to rally international support.

BELFAST, Northern Ireland – Law enforcement in Northern Ireland has activated a major security alert in Dunmurry, a suburban town on the edge of Belfast, following confirmation that a vehicle-borne explosive device detonated close to a local police station. The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) announced Sunday that residents living in the surrounding area have been evacuated from their homes, and the general public has been urged to steer clear of the cordoned-off zone to avoid potential risks from further explosive hazards.

Local UK Member of Parliament Sorcha Eastwood, who represents the Lagan Valley constituency southwest of Belfast, spoke publicly about her reaction to the overnight incident, describing the news as deeply unsettling. “It is distressing and disturbing to wake up to the news that a car bomb exploded outside Dunmurry police station last night,” Eastwood said. She went on to note that the targeted area is a densely populated hub that is home to residential neighborhoods, local small businesses, and regularly sees large numbers of residents out for social activities or work on weekend evenings. She emphasized that the absence of any injuries or fatalities was nothing short of a stroke of luck. “It is only through the grace of God that there are no casualties,” she added.

As of Sunday, investigators have not released any confirmed details about potential suspects or the underlying motive for the attack. The incident also comes in the wake of a similar attempted bombing just one month prior roughly 32 kilometers southwest of Dunmurry, targeting another PSNI station in the town of Lurgan.

According to law enforcement accounts of the Lurgan incident, two men wearing masks intercepted a delivery driver, forced the driver at gunpoint to drive a vehicle fitted with a crude but functional improvised explosive device to the station’s entrance. The incident forced the evacuation of more than 100 local homes before a controlled explosion could be carried out to disable the device. Officials concluded the attack was orchestrated by dissident Republican factions opposed to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, a landmark peace deal that brought an end to decades of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland. PSNI characterized the Lurgan attack as a “pathetic attempt to remain relevant and provoke fear” among local communities.

The Good Friday Agreement, brokered in 1998, effectively ended 30 years of violent unrest known as The Troubles, which pitted Republican groups seeking unification with the Republic of Ireland against pro-union factions that wish to keep Northern Ireland part of the United Kingdom. While the peace deal has drastically reduced large-scale violence, small dissident groups that reject the power-sharing framework of the agreement continue to carry out sporadic low-level attacks targeting police and government infrastructure.

Four decades after the world’s worst nuclear disaster shattered communities across what is now northern Ukraine, residents of Slavutych defied wartime curfews and official warnings against large public gatherings to honor the dead and heroes of the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe in a midnight commemoration held on the 25th of April, 2026.

Slavutych, the purpose-built city located roughly 50 kilometers from the shattered remains of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, is inextricably tied to the disaster’s legacy. Built in the aftermath of the April 26, 1986 explosion to house displaced plant workers and their families, the city welcomed its first permanent residents in 1988. Today, it holds the collective memory of a catastrophe that exposed decades of dangerous negligence and institutional secrecy under the former Soviet Union. For 48 hours after the reactor exploded, Soviet authorities hid the scale of the accident from the public, only acknowledging the disaster after radioactive fallout drifted across Northern Europe and Swedish scientists raised public alarm.

An estimated 600,000 emergency responders and cleanup workers, widely known as Chernobyl’s “liquidators,” were drafted into the deadly work of extinguishing the reactor fire and containing radioactive contamination. Thirty workers lost their lives within months of the accident, claimed by the blast or acute radiation sickness. Millions of people across Ukraine and neighboring Belarus were exposed to life-threatening radiation levels, and hundreds of towns and villages were permanently abandoned, forcing hundreds of thousands of residents into mass permanent evacuation.

Like much of northern Ukraine, Slavutych has faced new upheaval amid Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The city was briefly occupied by Russian forces early in the war during Moscow’s failed push to capture Kyiv, and it has endured brutal winters marked by widespread power outages that left some residents cooking meals over open fires in city streets. Even with these risks and ongoing restrictions, the annual commemoration vigil has gone ahead without fail, drawing crowds of all ages to the city’s central square.

This year, attendees streamed into the plaza before midnight, many arriving as families carrying armfuls of spring tulips and daffodils. They arranged candles across the ground to form a giant radiation hazard symbol, a quiet tribute to those who lost their lives to the disaster. The gathering unfolded against a backdrop of Soviet-era apartment blocks, with a war memorial honoring local residents killed in the ongoing invasion standing a short distance away.

For many attendees, the vigil is a deeply personal ritual. Seventy-one-year-old Liudmyla Liubyva once attended the ceremony with her husband, a former Chernobyl plant worker who developed a radiation-linked disability that left him unable to walk. She told attendees that while honoring the sacrifices of liquidators remains a critical duty, Russia’s war has reignited long-dormant fears that the nuclear danger was never fully laid to rest. Referencing a 2025 Russian drone strike that damaged the New Safe Confinement — the massive steel dome constructed to seal radioactive contamination from the destroyed reactor — Liubyva said, “When the drone struck the arch, it felt like the world could return to 1986. We all — young and old alike — must protect our land, because it is so vulnerable.”

As soft instrumental music played, poetry about the disaster echoed across the square through loudspeakers. “Years pass, generations change, but the pain of Chernobyl does not fade,” a woman’s voice recited. At the front of the gathering, attendees dressed in white protective suits and face masks, symbolic of the gear liquidators were often forced to use during cleanup, stood in silent vigil holding lit candles.

Sixty-seven-year-old Larysa Panova, who was forced to abandon her native hometown of Chernobyl and resettle in Slavutych after the accident, said the new city has become her home, but she still longs for the forests and open land of the community she left behind. Before the full-scale invasion, Panova regularly traveled back to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone to visit remaining relatives or revisit the places of her childhood. The war has cut off that access, leaving her with only memories. “I never stop thinking of Chernobyl as my homeland,” Panova said. “You remember your school, your childhood, your youth — everything happened there, in Chernobyl.”

This reporting was contributed by AP correspondents Vasilisa Stepanenko and Volodymyr Yurchuk based in Kyiv, with financial support for nuclear security coverage provided by the Outrider Foundation. The Associated Press retains full editorial control over all content.

Forty years after the world’s worst nuclear accident, the Associated Press is republishing a groundbreaking 1986 report that first pulled back the Soviet Union’s veil of secrecy around the human cost of the Chernobyl disaster. On April 26, 1986, an explosion and subsequent fire destroyed reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in northern Ukraine, then part of the USSR. In the chaotic, information-blackout weeks that followed, Soviet authorities released only sparse, deliberately vague statements about the scale of death and destruction stemming from the catastrophe. It took a tip from an anonymous source and a risky on-the-ground investigation by two Western journalists to reveal the quiet toll unfolding hundreds of miles away in Moscow’s suburbs.

Acting on a telephone tip, then-AP Moscow correspondent Carol J. Williams and a fellow Western reporter traveled to Mitinskoye Cemetery, a sprawling green space on the capital’s northwestern outskirts. What they found there confirmed what Soviet officials had long hidden: a dedicated burial plot exclusively for those killed by the Chernobyl accident. Just inside the cemetery’s main gate, 23 freshly dug, uniform graves sat ready, with no public signage marking them as a memorial to nuclear disaster victims. Each mound of turned earth bore fresh floral arrangements from grieving relatives and had a poured concrete border; work crews were already busy installing identical plain marble headstones, while eerie, empty stretches of prepared ground made clear that more fatalities were expected.

Six of the completed headstones already bore the names of firefighters, whose deaths from radiation exposure had been briefly acknowledged in Soviet state media. A cemetery official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to the visiting reporters, confirmed the entire plot was reserved for people who died as a result of the April 26 accident. Every death date etched into the installed headstones fell after the Chernobyl explosion, with details of each victim’s name, birth year, and date of death painted in gold leaf. Some graves still only had handwritten temporary name placards, while the official confirmed a larger central monument would eventually be erected to honor all those buried here. “They will all be brought here,” he told the reporters, though he refused to disclose the expected final death toll.

At the time of Williams’ original reporting on June 24, 1986, the last official Soviet casualty update had been released 19 days earlier, on June 5. That statement put the official death toll at 26: two killed in the initial explosion and fire, and 24 more who died later from acute radiation sickness. Two of those initial fatalities were not buried in the Moscow plot: plant worker Valery Khodemchuk’s body was never recovered from the destroyed reactor, so he remains entombed within the ruined structure, as reported by the Communist Party daily *Pravda* in late May. Another, plant employee Vladimir Shashenok, was killed instantly in the blast and buried in a small village near the disaster site.

Even as Soviet officials declined to update the death toll, outside medical experts warned more fatalities were inevitable. Dr. Robert Gale, an American bone marrow specialist who traveled to Moscow to assist Soviet doctors in treating dozens of patients with severe acute radiation sickness, publicly noted that between 55 and 60 patients remained in critical condition, and many would not survive. All patients with severe radiation exposure from the accident were transferred to Moscow specialty hospitals, meaning any subsequent deaths would occur in the capital, explaining why victims were being buried hundreds of miles from their home region near Chernobyl.

The layout of the Mitinskoye plot made clear that more burials were planned: the 15 existing graves in the back row were followed by a second row of eight, with a gap that could fit seven more, signaling officials had already prepared for at least seven additional fatalities. For the six fallen firefighters buried in the plot, their headstones bore additional markings: gold-etched stars and the ranks they held in the elite military fire brigade that was first on scene to battle the reactor blaze, all of whom absorbed lethal doses of radiation while containing the fire.

Graveyard workers would not say when the burials had been carried out, nor whether funerals were held individually or as a single group service. Relatives had left carefully arranged bouquets of red and pink roses on each grave, quiet testaments to the lives cut short. An elderly Moscow woman visiting another section of the cemetery shared her quiet grief with the reporters: “It’s very sad, they were so young. They were brought here to be treated at hospitals, but they couldn’t be sent home to be buried.”

By the time of the reporters’ visit, Soviet authorities had already established an exclusion zone around the damaged Chernobyl plant, evacuating every resident from nearby contaminated towns and villages, leaving no local communities to host burials for the victims who died in Moscow.

The investigation did not come without consequences. After the reporters began documenting what they saw, cemetery officials confiscated their notebooks and film, noting that journalist access to the plot required special government approval. A police officer stationed at the cemetery confirmed the entire section was off-limits to anyone other than immediate family members of the deceased, and special permission from local government officials was required to photograph the headstones or record the victims’ names. Eventually, officials escorted the reporters out of the cemetery section after allowing them a brief, unrecorded look at the graves.

It has been 40 years since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, still regarded as the most catastrophic nuclear accident in human history. To mark this grim anniversary, BBC correspondent Jessica Parker journeyed into the heart of the exclusion zone to document Pripyat, the once-thriving Soviet city that has stood empty for four decades.

Pripyat was purpose-built in the 1970s to house workers and their families at the nearby Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, a flagship energy project of the Soviet Union. At its peak, the city was home to nearly 50,000 residents, with bustling schools, hospitals, apartment blocks, and cultural centers that made it a model Soviet community. All of that changed on April 26, 1986, when a safety test gone wrong triggered a massive explosion at the plant’s Reactor No. 4, sending a plume of radioactive fallout across much of Europe.

Within just 36 hours of the blast, Soviet authorities ordered the complete evacuation of Pripyat, forcing residents to leave almost all of their belongings behind under the promise that they would one day be able to return. That promise never came to pass. Today, Pripyat remains a frozen time capsule of Soviet life, reclaimed gradually by overgrown forests and wandering wildlife. Decades of exposure to the elements have left buildings crumbling, ferris wheels stand idle in an abandoned amusement park built for the May Day celebrations that never happened, and children’s toys still lie scattered in empty schoolyards.

Parker’s on-the-ground reporting offers a new, intimate look at the long-term consequences of the 1986 disaster, four decades after the world watched in horror as the catastrophe unfolded. The visit also comes amid renewed global attention on the Chernobyl site, following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine that put the facility at risk of damage from military activity. While radiation levels in most areas of the exclusion zone are now safe for short-term visits, the site remains uninhabitable for long-term human settlement, a permanent reminder of the devastating risks of nuclear energy gone wrong.