ENGHow the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant proved to be crucial for Ukraine in the battle of Kyiv

Chornobyl 22 is a documentary about the temporary occupation of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) by Russian forces. The film was directed by Ukrainian director Oleksii Radynskiy, and draws on the testimonies of Chornobyl NPP and exclusion zone workers. Radynskiy gathered the material that forms the basis of Chornobyl 22 during his work with The Reckoning Project: Ukraine Testifies, a project gathering “legally admissible testimonies” of Russian war crimes. 

Chornobyl 22 premiered during the International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen, Germany, where it won the Grand Prize. It premiered in Ukraine during the Docudays documentary film festival in Kyiv in June 2023.

The Village Ukraine talks to Oleksii Radynskyi about filming in Chornobyl and the pivotal role that the Chornobyl NPP played in the Armed Forces of Ukraine prevailing in the battle for Kyiv.

 Це інтерв’ю також можна прочитати українською.

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– You once said that in order to understand contemporary Ukraine, we have to understand Chornobyl and that in order to understand why the Russian occupation forces’ Kyiv offensive failed, we also have to understand Chornobyl. Why is that?

– The film is based on the pain-staking work we undertook to document war crimes in the Chornobyl [exclusion] zone. What struck me and our research group [The Reckoning Project: Ukraine Testifies] the most is all the evidence that during the invasion Russians were guided by totally outlandish ideas about what Ukraine is like. Not just outlandish ideas, but ideas rooted in myth and colonial imaginaries, which were out of touch with reality.

One of the reasons the full-scale invasion has failed, and especially in its early stages, is [Russians’] self-deceit with regard to what they thought they would find in Ukraine, what they would see in Ukraine and in the Chornobyl zone in particular. The eyewitness testimonies we gathered confirm this.

This was apparent on several levels. For me, the moment when Russian generals triumphantly told the Chornobyl NPP staff that the power plant was now under their control – and the CNPP management was forced to deal with them – was a pivotal moment. [The Russians] had to have everything explained to them: “First of all, we would like to correct you: you are not at a nuclear power plant, but at a post-accident nuclear power plant.” That’s an entirely different kind of facility.

– It’s the site of an enormous man-made disaster.

– Right. Here’s another thing: the Russians admitted that they rehearsed the capturing of the Chornobyl NPP at the Kursk NPP, its twin. [The Kursk NPP] is the same in every respect, except for the fact that its grounds are not contaminated by radiation. [Laughing] Capturing a power plant entails things like setting up checkpoints and taking control of the areas in its vicinity. They figured out where they’d dig in while at the Kursk plant, and then they dug in in the same way around the CNPP. That’s how they must’ve ended up in the Rudyi (Red) Forest [the 10 sq km area surrounding the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant within the exclusion zone - ed.]. They thought everything would be the same as in Kursk, but that’s not what happened.

The Russians were also using very old , pre-1986 [i.e., pre-Chornobyl disaster - ed.] maps of the Chornobyl zone. They literally said they had no clue where they were. I think this could be said about everywhere else in Ukraine that they’ve occupied. Guided by their colonial mentality, they physically couldn’t access the information they needed to make any gains.

– Serhii Plokhyi [in his book Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy], and in part also the HBO series Chernobyl, suggest that the Chornobyl disaster is first and foremost the tragedy of statelessness.

– Of course that’s part of the picture. It’s present in my film and in all my writing on the issue. In the film, I tried to draw parallels between what happened in 1986 and in 2022.

– In the beginning of your film, one of the protagonists says “before the war” – but he’s referring to 1986.

– I was surprised to find out that in the Chornobyl nuclear energy workers’ slang “before the war” means “before 1986”. They called [the Chornobyl nuclear disaster] a war because in its aftermath, the Soviet army was in charge of clean-up. Though of course it’s clear that that was a colonial war and Ukraine’s dependence on the USSR was a colonial dependence, and so it’s not surprising that there are these parallels, despite the specificity of some of these events. 

But saying that the [Chornobyl] disaster is a tragedy of Ukraine’s statelessness doesn’t fully account for what’d happened. I think Plokhyi also paints a more nuanced picture. It’s not just a tragedy of statelessness, it’s a tragedy of Ukraine’s colonial administration. After all, there was the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR). Before nuclear power plants were built [in Ukraine], the USSR only built them in Russia, on Russian territory. They had their own hierarchy and chains of command. Building the Chornobyl NPP in the Ukrainian SSR unleashed chaos. Plokhyi, and others besides him, describe well how institutions in different republics started arguing and competing. 

The government in Kyiv – Moscow’s Soviet colonial government in Kyiv – wanted to use this in its own power games. The building of the [Chornobyl] NPP ended up posing many threats, partly because it was already late in the Soviet Union’s existence and the government was pretty much inept.

– You also described the Chornobyl exclusion zone as a site where new images and imaginaries can be created. I keep going back to the moment when we all saw images of Russian tanks at the Chornobyl NPP. What was seeing that like for you?

– For me, there is a visual imaginary production regime. Over the last 30 years, the Chornobyl NPP has become a source of imagery of disaster and apocalypse.

For me, however, this fascination with the Chornobyl NPP, and the immediate distribution of those images online by the Russians – they’re part of [Russia’s] media strategy, designed to shock people. [Russia] tried to deploy this shock doctrine during the first days [of the war] to intimidate Ukrainians and the rest of the world. Tanks and the Chornobyl NPP were supposed to be one of the key images in this strategy.

– This is another example of nuclear blackmail.

– Totally. Even lawyers refer to it as such. I don’t remember being particularly shocked by what I’d seen. Of course there was a general sense of disappointment, even sadness or grief: “Well, they’ve really done it. They really have no idea what they got themselves into.”

Though I also think that the tanks at the Chornobyl NPP were not quite as memorable as Russian trenches in the Red Forest, as far as media images go. Maybe people who haven’t seen that footage can’t quite imagine what that looked like, but that media artifact had a much more powerful resonance. They lost this battle of images, too. Russian trenches in the Red Forest, and not [Russian tanks at the Chornobyl NPP] came to symbolize the Russian occupation.

– Obviously you didn’t start filming until the power plant was liberated, you got there later. When did you first feel this urge to film everything that was happening [after 24 February 2022]?

– It’s like I had an intuition. Like everyone else back then, I wanted to put my skills to good use. At first I was doing something else: my colleagues asked me to join them as an editor on the KinoDopomoha project; I was there from the first days. I wasn’t filming though – I edited the footage I was given.

But I’ve been interested in Chornobyl since way before that; we were planning an entirely different project there just before the [full-scale] invasion. It wasn’t a new interest of mine. But I saw it from a new angle.

[Chornobyl 22] started with me being invited to join The Reckoning Project team. They’re documenting war crimes across Ukraine, focusing on incidents that the team believes to be especially important, revealing, or typical. It’s not just a media project but an initiative that works with lawyers to prepare witnesses of Russian war crimes for giving testimony that might be used in courts and during tribunals.

Soon after the Chornobyl area was liberated, we started recording in-depth interviews with the power plant staff and people who witnessed the occupation. We weren’t doing it in Chornobyl, but we’d talk to those people in person, some of them more than once. Of course we had a lot more footage than what was included in the film. After we got all those testimonies and realized the full extent of what’d happened and what those people had gone through, we went to the Chornobyl [exclusion] zone to see everything firsthand.

– Tell me about the logistics. In the first months [of Russia’s full-scale invasion], it was difficult to get to the Chornobyl exclusion zone. Vitalii Deineha from the Ukrainian Witness project told us how difficult it was to film at the Chornobyl NPP at first. You got there a bit later, right?

– We got there in July, when it was easier to travel. Unfortunately, now the entire area is closed for visitors, except maybe for some journalists. I think we were lucky; they made an exception for us thanks to Maksym Shevchuk from the State Agency on Exclusion Zone Management. Maksym grasped how important our project was straight away, from the first moments of our conversation, so we were given access. It was possible to use the area’s major roads – some of the mines had already been cleared.

– Your film shows that: the mine clearing operations, the traces of Russian soldiers’ presence in the power plant, the destruction of the archives.

– That scene is about the archive of the Chornobyl exclusion zone ecological center. It’s been totally destroyed; the archive of the center’s research department, which contains information and research on flora, fauna, soils, and so on, has been stolen. It’s not just about the archive though – [the Russians] destroyed all of the center’s expensive, unique equipment.

But we all know lots of things have been stolen from the Chornobyl power plant – equipment and so on.

– Hard drives, for example. 

– Yes, they took the hard drives. Testimonies indicate that they took away everything they could. We were just lucky the crucial Chornobyl NPP equipment was too big for them to carry. Things like computers on the other hand they could manage.

– In addition to being a film about testimonies and documenting war crimes and their effects, Chornobyl 22 also tells a story about the professionalism [of the power plant’s staff] under unprecedented circumstances.

– Yes. We were able to get into the power plant staffers’ world; they’re a very special community of Chornobyl nuclear experts, they’re really phenomenal people. And not just because they endured all that: a majority of them spent those 35 days without rest or proper sleep at the occupied nuclear power plant.

I don’t think all of us fully understand what that was like, and how those people handled that situation. That deserves respect. Though of course people have different opinions about that: some say that [the power plant staff] worked under occupation and were forced to coexist with the occupiers. This happens because, sadly, not everyone understands the nature of this facility.

First and foremost [the power plant staff] complied with international and Ukrainian legislation. They put nuclear security and the facility’s physical survival above everything else. They told the occupiers: “Here, you have to comply with Ukrainian law. If you don’t, you will die.”

– I remember the quote: “Every visitor, including occupiers, must comply with the [Chornobyl NPP] rules.”

– They held a safety briefing for the military top brass [of the Russian occupation forces] because that was their duty under the law. The occupiers found themselves in this Kafkaesque world of Ukrainian bureaucracy, where they were being told what they could and couldn’t do. [Laughing]

[The power plant staff] couldn’t openly resist. Open resistance at the station, as one of the Chornobyl NPP engineers put it, would leave you “in one of two coffins: a lead one or a zinc one.”

By the end [of the Russian occupation], there were different opinions among the staff. Though they weren’t able to resist openly, they engaged in something that’s called the “Italian strike”: they made the occupiers’ lives as difficult as they could, without, however, threatening the security of this dangerous facility.

I don’t want to single anyone out, but Valentyn Heiko, the head of the shift, and Valerii Semenov, the lead engineer of physical protection service… To say that they’re heroes is to say nothing. Moreover, the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant and its personnel have played a huge part not just in the liberation of the power plant itself, but also the rest of Kyiv Oblast. And I can say this without relying solely on the accounts of the power plant staff.

I tried, as much as I could, to research the role of the Chornobyl NPP in the battle for Kyiv and in the liberation of Kyiv Oblast. Most researchers of the battle for Kyiv look at what was happening near Kyiv or in the area where hostilities were active. Things that happened behind the frontline usually remain out of sight. The Chornobyl NPP was far behind the frontline, for example, but played a key role. The plant’s management were somehow able to convince the Russians to use their diesel to power the entire plant from a diesel generator, after it got cut off the power grid. The Russians brought an unimaginably large amount of diesel there.

– At least 90 tonnes?

– Thirty tonnes a day, for four to five days.

– That fuel could’ve been used for tanks, but wasn’t.

– The Russians said that in four days the power plant consumed half of all the fuel that [Russian occupation forces in Kyiv Oblast] had. This is what historians will have to do: to tally everything up, to assess the role of these events. Though we already know that the Russians had significant logistical issues by mid-March, when this happened.

We don’t know what set off the butterfly effect, but I think that all those things together played a role. Having a hundred tonnes of fuel less must have significantly challenged the occupiers.

– There are people with different skills on The Reckoning Project team: most have a background in media, but there are also people with all sorts of other experiences and backgrounds. I’m curious how your experience as a director helped you in this work, since documenting war crimes pursues different goals [than documentary films] and has to follow its own set of rules and procedures. How was it for you?

– Well, first of all, it was important for me that all of us were trained how to talk to witnesses and how to document war crimes. But overall I thought back then that I had skills that might be useful. It’s not like this job demands things that are vastly different from the demands of being a director.

We have to be able to interview people. In our case, we also have to do it so that it looks like a part of people’s lives. That’s how [documentary film-making] is different from journalism, with all due respect for the latter. It’s also an open process, we never know where it’ll take us. But the main thing in this project – and the reason why I don’t just think it’s important work but consider myself privileged [to be part of it] – is the opportunity it gave us to really dig deep into this issue. That’s different from more traditional media work.

I don’t think reporting as a genre is worse than documentary film-making, but these circumstances called for a particular approach, and we were given an opportunity to step outside the constraints of traditional journalistic reporting. To delve deep into the lives of power plant workers and research an unprecedented war crime, the seizure of a nuclear power plant. This is the first time in history that’s happened. I’m very grateful to the project’s team for giving us an opportunity to dedicate to these events all the attention that their scale and magnitude required. That was part of why it made sense to make a documentary about it.

– One of the key differences is why you’re filming. In media journalism your goal is to tell a story, while your goal is to prove that that was a war crime, and to provide evidence for future trials. How does that affect your work as a director?

– This project’s peculiarity lies in the fact that we’re working on two things at the same time. We gather testimony about war crimes, document them, and then use this data in two ways. Researchers, lawyers, and legal analysts (people working with the International Criminal Court in the Hague and in other places) have access to this data. The information that we gather is broadly used in two ways. The lawyers do their work, and we, the documentarians, do ours.

When you interview an engineer who has lived through the occupation of the Chornobyl NPP, you don’t know in advance whether they’ll share something with you that might be used in trial, or something that the lawyers might not find particularly interesting, but that would help convey the scale of the events.

While working on this film, we had to forget, for a time, that we were making a film, forget about artistic expression, and turn into researchers gathering information. Later on, when we were working on the film, we had to find a way to convey that information cinematically.

– But even working within this format you were able to preserve some of your signature features – for example, all those tracking shots.

– I always work with Maksym Savchenko, a cameraman responsible for that footage. We were overall able to get everyone from the crew I always work with involved in this project, including first and foremost the producer Liuba Knoroziuk; she produces the entire The Reckoning Project. I also got to work with the sound engineer I always work with, Andrii Panesenko, who created a unique soundscape [for the film].

– Did you have to choose between making a project about documenting war crimes or a documentary film? Or did the decision to make a documentary emerge organically from your work?

– I wanted to do it as organically as possible, to make a documentary that wouldn’t just document war crimes, but also describe the context of those events. I’d say this documentary gets the closest to journalism out of all my previous ones.

I do think that these two genres can very fruitfully talk to each other. Maybe we could’ve made more of a feature film, but I wanted to make a hybrid of these two [formats]: [documentary] and war crime research, which also follows the particular format of witness interviews.

It also involved working with lots of other materials, including media. We were all lucky because one of the exclusion zone workers, who wished to remain anonymous, filmed everything on his phone – every movement of the Russian troops. We had access to his archive. These things lie somewhere between a documentary film and forensic evidence gathering. They’re cinematographically interesting, but they could also be used as court testimony.

– You said that capturing the power plant was a war crime in itself. I know that this war keeps throwing all sorts of unprecedented events our way, which we don’t know how to make sense of, simply because they’ve never happened before. I don’t expect you to give me a definitive answer, but tell me about the legal part of this: how will The Reckoning Project prove that capturing the power plant was a war crime?

– That’s a very important question. On the one hand, from the legal point of view, the advantage of this investigation is the fact that there’s hardly anything that needs proving. Because, first of all, the Russians did it openly – they’ve admitted to everything. Moreover, they named the perpetrators and awarded them the titles of the Hero of the Russian Federation. In this case, proving that capturing the nuclear power plant is a war crime shouldn’t be an issue for a lawyer, because it’s spelled out in international nuclear energy regulations.

So on the one hand, this is an unprecedented situation, something that’s never happened before. But capturing a nuclear power plant, taking hostages – this is surface-level stuff. Unfortunately I can’t tell you how this lawsuit will develop or in what court it will be heard. This is what the project’s legal team’s working on.

But there’s one crucial detail: as far as I know, none of the other crimes [The Reckoning Project] researchers have looked into have clearly defined perpetrators [like in the Chornobyl case]. They don’t need to be identified. They’d identified themselves. I hope that it might become one of the loudest, but also fast and efficient, trials, because the Russians did everything so stupidly and openly that they ended up doing our work for us. For example, we know that General Sergey Burakov led the operation to capture the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant. But how exactly it’ll happen, whether it will be in absentia or in a court of law – that’s another matter.

Oleksii Radynskyi during the Docudays 2022 festival

– The film ends with a caption that says there is a threat of another attack on Chornobyl. Meanwhile, the Russians continue to occupy the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant. Why did you want to stress that in the end of the film?

– First of all, because it’s true. Of course now that seems a lot less likely. But it was still winter when we wrapped up the film, and there was a lot of talk about the possibility of another attack from the north.

[This threat] isn’t about to go away, unfortunately. Of course, they won’t be able to launch an offensive, but they still maintain the threat [in the north] to tie up our defense forces. There’s a lot of military personnel there. We’ll continue seeing a growing militarization of the [Chornobyl exclusion] zone.

The same goes for reinforcing the Ukrainian-Belarusian border. It’s not just about the number of military personnel there. Conversations with them and with local residents grew more reassuring every time we came to Chornobyl as they told us about all the work being done to reinforce the border. It seems like a lot of work has been done there, though of course now that entire area will be militarized.

And obviously nuclear terror and nuclear blackmail aren’t entirely gone either – not just in terms of the threat of another attack [on the Chornobyl NPP], but with everything that’s going on at the Zaporizhzhia NP. We wanted to investigate the situation at the ZNPP with The Reckoning Project team. We’ll be able to do the work we did at the Chornobyl NPP at the ZNPP only after the plant is liberated.

– I hope that’ll be possible.

– I think it probably will be.