Russian troops have begun leaving the Chernobyl nuclear power plant after soldiers were exposed to significant radiation while digging trenches in highly radioactive areas, Ukraine’s state energy company said, according to the Associated Press.
Ukrainian state-owned nuclear power company Energoatom has said most Russian troops who took control of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant after invading Ukraine have left an abandoned nuclear power plant, according to Reuters.
“It has been confirmed that the occupiers who seized the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and other facilities in the exclusive zone marched in two columns to the Ukrainian border with Belarus,” the company said, adding that “a small number” of Russian soldiers remained. The report says that Russian troops were also withdrawn from the town of Slavutych, where the station workers live.
Energoatom did not provide information on the condition of the soldiers and the number of victims. But he said the Russians had dug into the woods near the now-closed station, where the world’s worst nuclear disaster occurred in 1986.
The soldiers “panicked at the first signs of illness”, which “appeared very quickly” and began to prepare for departure, according to Energoatom.