Inside Chernobyl, 200 Exhausted Staff Toil Round the Clock at Russian Gunpoint

Trapped since their shift 3 weeks ago, the Ukrainians keeping the abandoned nuclear plant safe are ill-fed, stressed, and desperate for relief

It was 10 a.m., 16 days into Russia’s war on Ukraine, and a land-line phone rang inside the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. The site of the world’s worst nuclear-power disaster had become an impromptu prison, and an increasingly dangerous one.

The signalman on duty lifted the receiver and passed the call to shift supervisor Valentin Heiko, a veteran of the defunct facility. Mr. Heiko told managers on the other end of the line that the 210 technicians and support staff were in a desperate situation, held hostage while keeping watch over thousands of spent fuel rods.

The night before had brought another standoff between the exhausted technicians responsible for safeguarding the nuclear waste and the Russian soldiers who have been holding them on the job at gunpoint since the first hours of the war.

“The psychological situation is deteriorating,” Mr. Heiko said, updating managers in an office 30 miles away, two people on that call recalled. Some technicians, demanding to go home, were threatening to walk out, past the Russian tanks parked outside.

The supervisor, who celebrated his 60th birthday in captivity last week, said it was his duty to toil on as long as required. “Everyone wants to go home, but we know we need to stay.”

Since Feb. 23, Chernobyl’s technicians and support staff have been working nonstop. After arriving at 9 p.m. for a single night shift to monitor electrical transmission levels and the temperature inside the plant’s gigantic sarcophagus housing radioactive waste, they are approaching 500 hours on the job—snatching sleep on chairs in front of beeping machinery and on piles of clothes next to workstations.

Their diet has dwindled to porridge and canned food, prepared by a 70-year-old cook who at one point collapsed from exhaustion. Their phones have been confiscated and they are trailed by Russian soldiers through the nuclear plant’s labyrinth of reinforced-concrete corridors.

For weeks, the world’s nuclear energy regulators have been trying to understand what is happening inside the Chernobyl complex, where the condition of the facility and its crew has been shrouded by competing for Ukrainian and Russian narratives. Russia rallies militias ahead of Ukraine urban assaults

Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman leader of Chechnya, claimed on Telegram Monday that he had been in Ukraine alongside Chechen fighters

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Paris (AFP) – A Russian call for fighters from Syria and Chechnya to join its war in Ukraine is motivated by plans to take major cities with urban warfare tactics which will require overwhelmingly superior attacking numbers, Western observers say.

After three weeks of fighting, all of the 150,000 Russian soldiers initially deployed at the Ukrainian border are now inside the country, experts say.

"The Russians have no more reserves in the zone," a source at the French military chiefs of staff told AFP.

But if President Vladimir Putin wants to capture major cities such as Kyiv and the Black Sea port of Odesa, he will have to bolster troops on the ground after an initial campaign phase that has been slower than the Kremlin expected.

This could equate to a numerical superiority of roughly 10 attackers for every Ukrainian soldier defending the urban centers, according to a military source, who asked not to be named.

Local knowledge, mobility, and early occupation of vantage points typically favor defending forces in urban combat, adding the source.

The Kremlin said Friday that volunteers including those from Syria were welcome to fight alongside Russia's military in Ukraine.

On Tuesday, a war monitor said Russia had drawn up lists of 40,000 fighters from the Syrian army and allied militia ranks to be put on standby for deployment in Ukraine.

In a country where soldiers earn between $15 and $35 per month, Russia has promised them a salary of $1,100 to fight in Ukraine, the Observatory reported.

'Massive reinforcements needed'

"Putin needs more troops than he thought he would. And he needs irregular troops because this war is becoming insurrectional," a Western security source said.

After failing to conquer Ukraine quickly, "Russia now needs massive reinforcements in terms of equipment and troops" to continue the war, said Mathieu Boulegue, a research fellow specializing in Russia at Chatham House, a think tank.

Moscow's recourse to Syrian soldiers follows on from Russia's intervention in 2015 in the war-torn country on behalf of the government, helping President Bashar al-Assad clock up decisive victories in the decade-long conflict.

Russia's airforce notably helped Syrian forces during their siege of rebel-held Aleppo.

Syrian fighters have been deployed in foreign theatres before, by both Russia and Turkey in Libya, and by Turkey in Nagorno-Karabakh to help Ankara's ally Azerbaijan.

Putin has ordered his forces "to hold back on any immediate assault on large cities," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday. But, he added, the defense ministry "does not rule out" the possibility of putting large cities "under its full control".

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky slammed the Russian recruitment in Syria, saying Russia was hiring "murderers".

'Guess how close we are

Fighters from Russia's overwhelmingly Muslim southern region of Chechnya are also loyal to the Kremlin and battle-hardened from reported past deployments in Syria and eastern Ukraine.

Numerous videos posted on social media have suggested that they are already present inside Ukraine.

Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman leader of Chechnya, claimed on his Telegram channel Monday that he had been in Ukraine just outside Kyiv alongside the forces.

"You don't have much time left," he wrote in a taunting message to the Ukrainian leadership. "Better to surrender and join us," he said, adding in gloating aside: "guess how close we are" to Kyiv.

Kadyrov, a devout Muslim who rules the Russian region in the northern Caucasus with an iron fist, is a former rebel turned Kremlin ally with a paramilitary force at his command.

At the start of the Russian offensive, images circulated on social networks showing a square in the Chechen capital Grozny filled with soldiers claiming to be on their way to Ukraine.

Kadyrov's forces are accused by rights activists of numerous abuses in Chechnya, including killings and enforced disappearances.

On Tuesday Kadyrov indicated he was back in Chechnya, welcoming to the region the secretary of Russia's national security council Nikolai Patrushev, a key member of Putin's inner circle.

One Child Becoming A Refugee Every Second In Ukraine, Says UN

Ukraine War: New figures showed over 3 million people have fled Ukraine. Nearly half of them are children

Geneva: Some 1.4 million children have now fled Ukraine since the Russian invasion began on February 24, meaning nearly one child a second has become a refugee, the UN said Tuesday.

Fresh numbers from the International Organization for Migration (IOM) showed Tuesday that more than three million people have now fled Ukraine. Nearly half of them are thus children.

"On average, every day over the last 20 days in Ukraine, more than 70,000 children have become refugees," James Elder, spokesman for the UN children's agency UNICEF, told reporters in Geneva.

That amounts to around 55 every minute, "so almost one per second," he said, stressing that "this crisis in terms of speed and scale is unprecedented since World War II."