The occupiers spent more than a month in the Exclusion Zone and probably got radiation sickness. This is what Chornobyl and Prypiat look like after the occupation — Babel photo report

In the first days of the war, Russian troops who invaded Ukraine from Belarus seized the Chornobyl nuclear power plant and took up positions in the Exclusion Zone. Despite life-threatening levels of radiation, the occupiers dug trenches in the Red Forest

and probably took deadly sources of ionizing radiation from the Chornobyl laboratory. On March 31, the Russians left the area. Photographer and founder of the “Chernobyl Zone — Radioactive Team” Anton Yukhymenko, especially for Babel, photographed what the occupiers left behind in Prypiat and Chornobyl: mutilated equipment, looted administrative buildings and plaques rewritten in Russian.