EXCLUSIVE Report from Ukraine: Wolves and Russians (Part II)
Guest article by Ken Harbaugh, in the Red Forest (outside Chernobyl, Ukraine)
The forest opened into a clearing, and the horizon was filled by a structure so massive it looked like a storm cloud dropped to earth. This was the sarcophagus: the largest moveable building in the world, a steel and concrete vault the size of a stadium, slid into place over the ruins of Reactor Four. Inside it lies the most radioactive site on the planet.
Even here, the war had left its mark. A gaping hole from a Russian drone strike had torn the structure open only days earlier. According to Valeri, the special forces officer acting as my escort, the reactor was not the intended target. “They were aiming for The Box,” he said.
The Box — “Pandora’s Box,” as the nuclear technicians monitoring the site call it — is the repository for the lethal debris of the disaster. Steel-and-concrete barrels, tested to last a hundred years, contain material that will remain deadly for millions. Saboteurs have tried to reach it before. “The Russians want to burn it,” Valeri explained. “Not just the forest — everything. If Pandora’s Box is broken, hell comes out. But the Russians… they do not care.”
The Bridge of Death
We stopped on a bridge over the railway, the road empty of traffic for miles in either direction. “We call this the Bridge of Death,” Valeri said.
On the night of the explosion in 1986, residents of Pripyat crowded here to watch the fire. They described a column of electric-blue air, ionized particles rising into the sky. One engineer recalled “a huge beam of projected light flooding up into infinity from the reactor… it was light-bluish, and it was very beautiful.”
It was also lethal. Locals say most of those who stood here that night died soon afterward.
The Red Forest
Beyond the bridge lay the Red Forest, where radioactive fallout was so intense that pine needles turned rust-red before the trees withered and died. The Soviets buried the poisoned forest under sand, replanted saplings, and posted warning signs. But they did nothing to stop contaminants from seeping into the soil and water.
It was here that, in the first days of the invasion, Russian troops dug defenses. Many had no idea what Chernobyl was. Finding a thick layer of sand beneath the leaf litter, they shoveled it into sandbags to fortify their positions.
Weeks later, during Ukraine’s push to retake Chernobyl, an American foreign legionnaire told me he saw the results: “Hundreds of Russian soldiers lying outside their trenches, covered in radiation burns and their own vomit.” A modern army, undone not only by Ukraine’s counteroffensive, but by an invisible poison — and their own ignorance.
The Long Memory of Radiation
As we drove on, warning signs with the black radiation trefoil appeared more frequently. “This land remembers,” Valeri said. Even when the Soviets bulldozed and buried, the particles lingered, waiting to be unearthed.
It struck me how blind the Russian soldiers must have been, marching into the most contaminated land on the planet without maps, without protective gear, without even the knowledge of what had happened there. Their arrogance repeated that of the Soviet planners who claimed their nuclear reactors would light the future.
Wolves
We stopped at the edge of the forest so I could take photographs of the old trenches and bunkers. Signs warned of mines, and Valeri cautioned me not to step off the asphalt. In the mud beside the road, I saw a pawprint. I own a large German Shepherd. The print in front of me dwarfed his. I stretched my hand across it — it would have easily fit inside.
Valeri smiled, patted his rifle, and said again: “Russians… and wolves.”
In the years since the evacuation, wolves have returned to Chernobyl in numbers never seen before. Packs roam the deserted villages and forests, adapted to radiation in ways scientists are only beginning to understand. Blood tests suggest resistance to cancer. Mutant wolves, thriving where humans cannot.
The Scan
At the final checkpoint, guards waved a Geiger counter over our vehicle. We stepped into a scanner that looked like an airport metal detector, its sensors clicking as they searched for traces of contamination. The machine gave the all-clear.
We drove out of the zone, leaving behind the skeletal chimneys, the charred forests, and the silent hospital. But the image that stayed with me was that pawprint in the mud — a reminder that even in a landscape ravaged by hubris and war, life finds a way back.
Chernobyl was supposed to be uninhabitable for centuries. Wolves have reclaimed it, indifferent to our warnings and mistakes. They are nature’s heirs to the poisoned land we left behind.
Wolves and Russians. One adapts, survives, and endures. The other keeps coming, determined to burn everything in its path.
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Excellent article.