They didn’t want to party safe. A group of young people planned to celebrate New Year in the highly radioactive Chornobyl exclusion zone, some 130 kilometers north of Kyiv. However, local police officers interfered in their preparations.
Police spotted three young men – two from Kyiv Oblast and one from Kharkiv Oblast – and a 25-year-old woman in one of the abandoned houses in a village of Ilovnytsia located some 24 kilometers from Nuclear Plant’s Reactor.
A group of young people in green and black paramilitary gear was spotted in Chornobyl on Dec. 31. Photo: Facebook/Vadim Zuev
They entered so-called “Dead Zone” on Dec. 31 despite government prohibitions. The area is tightly regulated to keep a group of “stalkers” – those who enter Chornobyl for fun – from sneaking in and taking out artifacts.
Young people will face a fine of up to Hr 510 ($19).
Shortly after the Chornobyl power plant exploded on April 26, 1986 and sent huge plumes of radiation throughout the western Soviet Union and Europe, the USSR leaders declared a 1,000-square-kilometer Exclusion Zone uninhabitable, and mass evacuations began to take place.
Three decades later, the haunted zone, which remains a wasteland, still attracts lots of tourists.
Recently Chornobyl got a possibility for revival. On Nov. 29 the New Safe Confinement, the arched structure that weighs 36,000 tons and is more than a 100 meters high, covered the ruined reactor No. 4 – of the now-closed power plant.
