PHOTO ESSAY: AP photographer chronicles Chernobyl’s painful legacy of silence, sacrifice and danger

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Efrem Lukatsky, a Kyiv-based photographer for The Associated Press, was living in the city on April 26, 1986, when the explosion and fire struck the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, about a two-hour drive away. He has visited the plant and the “exclusion zone” around it dozens of times. He recalls the disaster that has haunted him and Ukraine for 40 years.

It began with whispers at work.

There was no official announcement about the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant when it happened in 1986 — only fragments of information passed quietly among colleagues.

I was in my late 20s at the time and was a specialized underwater welder for a Kyiv institute that sent me to offshore platforms and classified military bases across the Soviet Union.

No one spoke openly about what happened at Chernobyl — which is transliterated as “Chornobyl” in Ukraine — but unease was growing. There was a metallic taste in my mouth and a dryness in my throat. Others had it, but no one understood why.

The first official, brief acknowledgment came two days later — that an accident had occurred. Nothing more. People spoke in hushed tones about plant firefighters being flown to hospitals in Moscow.

Officially, life continued as normal.

At night, we tuned in to Western broadcasts — still considered subversive in those days — for news the state would not provide. We learned the accident had spread a plume of radiation beyond the USSR’s borders. Experts urged people to seal windows, wear masks and give iodine to children. I followed their advice, placing an iodine drop each day on a sugar cube to protect my thyroid gland from absorbing contamination.

Warnings from friends

My family home was in Kyiv, where a neighbor warned me about radioactive dust. Later, I saw her husband, a policeman, strip off his clothes in the stairwell and seal them in a bag before going inside.

A friend, a nuclear physicist, called and urged me to leave Kyiv for good, and some residents sent their children to other regions. I didn’t go. My parents were here and it was my home.

I found an old military radiation meter and checked everything — my apartment, my clothes, the streets. The readings were unsettling. At a playground, they climbed far above normal. At home, they were even higher. I used tape to lift the dust off my clothes.

Five days after the explosion, the annual May Day parade went ahead in Kyiv as planned. Thousands filled the streets, many of them children. I marched too, past a monument to Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin, and was handed a banner praising the leadership.

Days later, the city hosted a cycling race, and spectators lined the streets as if nothing had happened. The state said nothing was wrong, but we already knew otherwise.

Evacuees arrive

After the accident, long columns of buses moved slowly into Kyiv, carrying thousands of evacuees from Pripyat, the city adjacent to Chernobyl where most of its workers lived.

I remember their faces — uncertain but calm. They were told they’d be gone only a few days. They left behind homes, belongings and pets who died waiting for owners who never returned.

Three weeks after the disaster, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev addressed the nation, giving no explanation for the delay or reporting fully what had happened.

A first visit

In autumn 1986, I first visited what became known as Chernobyl’s “exclusion zone,” a 2,600-square-kilometer (1,000-square-mile) area, having been sent there as part of a team from my scientific institute, and later as a stringer photographer for the Soviet magazine, Ogonyok.

Silent apartment blocks stood beside schools, swimming pools and businesses that looked as if their occupants had just stepped out.

But what stayed with me most were those sent to contain the disaster. Firefighters, we learned, had dragged hoses across wreckage, trying to extinguish a blaze that water couldn’t quench. Tens of thousands of cleanup crews, or “liquidators,” were sent in to remove contaminated soil or seal the damaged reactor in concrete. Soldiers scraped radioactive debris from the plant’s roof, risking lethal exposure in minutes.

Then there were the coal miners. To prevent the plant’s radioactive fuel from reaching the groundwater, they dug tunnels beneath it through darkness and heat, often stripped to their shirts.

We had little protection — suits, boots and masks — that felt inadequate. Before leaving, we were inspected and washed down, as if that could undo any exposure. After each trip, I sealed my clothes in bags and discarded shoes and coats.

Information remained tightly controlled. Photographers had to hand over film after each assignment.

Shifting ground

But the truth already was spreading. People spoke more openly in Kyiv. The first protests were small and tentative but soon grew into larger demonstrations demanding answers — rallies that in turn formed the nucleus of Ukraine’s independence movement.

That was when my career as a journalist began. My photos were shown at an amateur exhibition, then published abroad. I thought I might be arrested.

By then, however, the Soviet system itself was under strain.

After the USSR collapsed in 1991 and Ukraine gained independence, I returned to the exclusion zone many times, often with scientists, police and firefighters. I was hired by the AP in 1989.

Another lasting image was seeing people awaiting medical checks. I photographed them — the very old and the very young — standing quietly for examinations for signs of illness.

Immediately after the accident, 30 plant workers and firefighters died from acute radiation sickness. Later, thousands of people died from radiation-related illnesses. Six photographers and cameramen sent there in the first days all died of illness later.

Inside the control room

Pripyat was frozen in time. At a hospital where the first victims were treated, radiation levels remained dangerously high.

Nearby was a vast machinery graveyard: Ambulances, buses, trucks, armored vehicles and helicopters used in the cleanup were abandoned as too contaminated. To photograph them, we moved quickly to minimize exposure.

Inside the power plant, dust hung thick in the air, catching the light. We moved quickly but carefully to the control room, where a routine test for Reactor No. 4 had gone wrong at 1:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986, triggering two explosions. Many buttons from the panels were missing — taken as souvenirs.

As we moved deeper into the plant, radiation levels rose, and we turned back. Some limits you do not cross.

Trying to contain radiation

As years passed, the original shelter over the reactor deteriorated, opening gaps where radiation leaked out. In 2019, the entire building was covered by an enormous arch-shaped shelter, designed to last generations. It seemed the situation finally was under control.

But Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and Moscow’s forces entered the exclusion zone, pushing toward Kyiv. The troops dug positions in contaminated soil, disturbing what had long been buried. Three years later, a Russian drone strike damaged the protective structure. There was no radiation leak, but it was a reminder that the danger persisted.

Without people, the still-contaminated exclusion zone has recovered in unexpected ways. Forests have spread. Wildlife has multiplied. Rare species now move through places once defined by disaster.

Pripyat remains frozen, but it’s no longer entirely empty, as animals roam through it.

After 40 years, that could be the clearest truth: Lives were upended, and for a long time, reality was kept hidden. But left alone, nature endures — even at Chernobyl.

This is a documentary photo story curated by AP photo editors.