Not too long after the Russian army attacked Ukraine, in its special operation, Russian troops entered the nuclear exclusion zone and then seized control of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. It was 36 years ago this month that the Unit Four Reactor took a major nuclear dump. I am not sure what an armored unit would want with the plant. One could only hope it was some sort of weird dark ecotourist excursion to observe wildlife. Some believe that they may have gone into Chernobyl to retrieve or destroy data stored at the site. Or maybe just to see what happens when a tank column drives over radioactive ground. Or maybe they were just plain stupid. In any case, they stayed long enough to expose troops to one of the most toxic places on earth before they left.
IAEA Imagebank, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant basically melted down and then blew its top on April 26, 1986 sending clouds of radiation debris 30,000 feet into the sky across Europe. About 650 miles away, at Sweden’s Forsmark Nuclear Power PLant, alarms went off. When no radiation leak was detected the Swedes looked southeast to the prevailing winds. The Swedes caught the Russians hanging out their radioactive laundry in the breeze, creating what is possibly the worst nuclear disaster on the books. Today we are seeing a different kind of Russian-made disaster in Ukraine. And so far, it is not nuclear.
At the time of the Chernobyl meltdown, Ukraine was just one of 15 republics that comprised the Union of Soviet Republics, or simply the USSR. When the Berlin Wall fell in December of 1989, the USSR as we knew it started to crumble–but did it. In August of 1991 Ukraine declared its independence. By December the other 14 former republics followed.
Russia’s is once again hanging out its dirty laundry. Its military meltdown in Ukraine begs the question: has Russia learned anything from history in the past 40-to-50 years. It seems they forgot about their Afghanistan debacle to add another defacto communist republic to their empire. Their efforts failed miserably on indoctrinating the tribal people of the Hindu Kush to the Soviet/Marxist brand of worker solidarity and socialism. But probably one reason they failed in Afghanistan was the lack of urban centers they could disintegrate.
And to further prove a point, they did not garner anything from our 20 years of failed nation building in Afghanistan. Twenty years of running down the Taliban and we are almost at the same place we started. And lest not forget our eight year attempt in Iraq to make the world safe for democracy–and from terror. But it could be possible that Russians did learn something from our adventures of in trying to avoid collateral damage and civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq. Russian battle doctrine appears to be all out death and destruction. Of course all of this is open for future historical debate.
I cannot help but think that the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine is their Chernobyl of military disasters. You would have to go back to the Russian-Japanese War in 1904 to see a real Russian beat down. Czar Nicholas II picked a fight with the Japan and their newly Westernized navy. The Japanese sunk both Russia’s Pacific Fleet and its Baltic Fleet. The Baltic Fleet had to travel 20,000 miles to join the Pacific Fleet at the bottom of the ocean. Nicki-two, like Putin, was looking to expand Russia’s empire. Both leaders were convinced that their adversary would roll over and beg for terms. Putin’s court eunuchs do not appear to be anymore clairvoyant than Nicholas’s when it comes to picking fights with palookas.
Ukraine is a Russian created humanitarian crisis just shy of Biblical proportions. All the while, a disbelieving world watches and wonders: how could this be. Targeting and destroying civilian infrastructure may have been a winning strategy in World War II, Chechnya and Syria; but pounding away at urban areas and cities with rockets and artillery is not winning over the hearts and minds of anybody. It has created a women and children exodus. According to the UN refugee agency more than 4.6 million Ukrainians have left Ukraine. That’s around 10 percent of the population escaping a Russian created hell. For Putin, I would say he is somewhere in Dante’s Seventh Ring of Hell, violence, working his way to down the to center of hell to join the ultimate sinners like Judas Iscariot.
Speaking of Biblical proportion, when you look to the past it is not hard to see why the Ukrainians do not want anything to do with the Russians. Joseph Stalin’s famines of 1932-33 ranks up their as a Category Five disaster. According to History.com: “The Ukrainian famine—known as the Holodomor, a combination of the Ukrainian words for “starvation” and “to inflict death”—by one estimate claimed the lives of 3.9 million people, about 13 percent of the population. And, unlike other famines in history caused by blight or drought, this was caused when a dictator wanted both to replace Ukraine’s small farms with state-run collectives and punish independence-minded Ukrainians who posed a threat to his totalitarian authority.” This is what passes for a comprehensive Five-Year Russian agricultural plan–kill anybody that wants something to eat.
And then there is Chernobyl. I have recently started reading Adam Higginbotham’s book: Midnight in Chernobyl, The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster. I did not get far into the book when I realized that some things have changed in Russia, but a lot of things have stayed the same. Higginbotham writes that: “Advancement in many political, economic and scientific careers was granted only to those who repressed their personal opinions, avoided conflict and displayed unquestioning obedience to those above them…blind conformism had smothered individual decision making at all levels of the state and Party machine, infecting not just the bureaucracy but technical and economic disciplines.” This is the Soviet Union in the 1970s and ’80s. But could very well be Czarist Imperial Russia of the past or Putin’s Russia federation of today; and Uncle Joe Stalin’s Soviet Union in-between.
There is a general belief that in a closed autocratic government there is no free flow of ideas moving up and down the chain of command. As Higginbotham writes about the USSR in the 1970s: “Party leaders and the heads of large enterprises–collective farms and tank factories, power stations–governed their staff by bullying and intimidation.”
Higginbotham also writes that: “Lies and deception were endemic to the system, trafficked in both directions along the chain of management: those lower down passed up reports to their superiors packed with falsified statistics and inflated estimates, of unmet goals triumphantly reached, unfulfilled quotas heroically exceeded. To protect his own position, at every stage, each manager relayed the lies upward or compounded them.” The question has to be asked: Are these the guys you want designing, building and operating the nuclear power plant down the street; or in the next country over.
Tadpolefarm, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
When Unit Four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant blew its top at least two people died in the explosion and another 30-50 died soon after. According to the World Nuclear Association, world-nuclear.org, “The plant operators’ town of Pripyat was evacuated on 27 April (45,000 residents). By 14 May, some 116,000 people that had been living within a 30-kilometre radius had been evacuated and later relocated.” Within a month, less than 90 miles from Chernobyl, more than 360,000 children and pregnant woman began evacuating Kiev. Ukrainians have had practice in trying to outrun Russian mistakes and aggression.
“Soviet physicist had been so confident of the safety of their own reactors that they had never bother indulging in heretical theorizing of beyond design-basis accidents*.“
Midnight in Chernobyl
With Chernobly there was lingering health problems from the radioactive contamination. It is believed that it took 600,000 “liquidators” to clean up the nuclear debris caused by the meltdown. It is possible that at least 6,000 of those liquidators died from the clean-up effort.
Today in Ukraine, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights estimates that there have been at least 4,232 civilian casualties: 1,793 killed and 2,439 injured so far in the so-called Russian denazification of Ukraine. However, some Ukrainian leaders in besieged town of eastern and southern Ukraine believe that number to be much higher, particularly after the discovery of massed graves in the city of Bucha. Some Ukrainian officials believe Russian troops have killed close to 400 civilians there.
All of this makes you wonder if Putin and his generals bothered to indulge in heretical war games as to possible outcomes in developing their special operations that bears more like an apocalyptic science fiction alien invasion . And if war itself is not brutal enough it looks to get worse, Putin’s new Ukrainian general, Alexander Dvornikov, known as the “Butcher of Syria” for his penchant at targeting civilians is now in command in Ukraine. Retired US Navy Adm. James Stavridis, a former Nato commander, told NBC News: “He is the goon called in by Vladimir Putin to flatten cities like Aleppo in Syria,” Stavridis said. “He has used tools of terrorism throughout that period, including working with the Syrian forces, torture centers, systematic rape, nerve agents. He is the worst of the worst.” A comedian once joked that we should never challenge worse by saying it can’t get worse.
The question that needs to be asked: Is there anything in Ukraine that the Russians have made better?
*Design-basis accident is “a postulated accident that a nuclear facility must be designed and built to withstand without loss to the systems, structures, and components necessary to ensure public health and safety.” United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission
https://www.history.com/topics/japan/russo-japanese-war
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-know-chernobyls-true-death-toll
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