Close to 8,000 extra Ukrainian border guards have been sent to the infamous radiation exclusion zone in the north of the country. The country is bracing for an invasion, possibly from Belarus, which borders Russia to the north and Chernobyl to the north-east. The site could be used as a rapid gateway for tanks to race south to encircle Kiev.
The 1,000-square-mile exclusion zone could once more become the focus of death and destruction 36 years after the world’s worst nuclear disaster.
The well-maintained highway running from Chernobyl to Kiev means Russian tanks could storm the 120-mile distance easily and quickly. Some 80,000 Russian and Belarus troops, including Spetsnaz special forces, are on the Belarus border, supposedly for military exercises.
Many in Ukraine believe Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to expand his country’s domination of its surrounding nations to become a kind of USSR Mark II.
More than 7,800 Ukrainian troops have been sent to Chernobyl to stop Russian tanks storming south. Lt Col Yuri Shakraichuk, from the Ukraine State Border Guard Service, said: “Chernobyl is an area of increased danger.
“We increased the number of patrols and we increased the number of people in these patrols.”
Yesterday the Daily Express had special permission to visit the zone – an eerie area of derelict factory buildings and houses and Soviet-era installations hidden in a vast pine forest.
Officials gave us radiation detecting devices which pinged below threshold readings during our three-hour stay. The area harks back to a powerful Soviet era, which was whittled down between 1988 and 1991. Just 145 civilians have resettled permanently here, mostly over 70 years old.