Combat between Russian Federation (RF) and Ukraine Armed Forces (UAF) in and around the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone (CES) has ignited forest fires, raising the possibility of radiation spread elsewhere by the smoke, a Ukrainian official said on Thursday, March 24.
Ruslan Silets, a spokesman from Ukraine’s Ministry of the Protection of Ecology and Natural Resources, in television comments widely repeated across Ukrainian media, said that firemen and other emergency response units were on the scene and that most of the fires were under control.
Artillery and direct fire exchanges between UAF and RF forces were a real danger for the fire-fighting crews, but, at present emergency responders have been able to reach all the fires and prospects were good that the blazes will be extinguished soon, he said.
Ukrainian officials in recent weeks have repeatedly accused RF forces of increasing dangers of a radiation leak by occupying the Chernobyl nuclear facility, looting radiation monitoring labs, and holding facility personnel hostage for almost a month. RF forces overran the facility on the second day of the war.
A KP check of radiation levels in a Kyiv suburb on Thursday, March 24, morning showed isotopes fully within normal safe readings.
The CES is a practically uninhabited 2,600 square kilometer territory in northern Ukraine evacuated in the wake of the Chonobyl nuclear power accident in April 1986.
Much of the CES is overgrown, wild and free of surface radiation, but according to scientists, forest fires and high winds in the CES can renew radiation release into the atmosphere, by exposing and allowing to move elsewhere underlying layers of still-radioactive dust.
Radioactive dust carried by smoke from the 1986 accident floated as far away as Sweden.
