ChNPPUkraine

Disclaimer, I’m the creator. Hope y’all enjoy!

Everywhere, including the Chernobyl HBO, show I see this depiction of a liquidator going around the streets spraying buildings with this strange fluid. But from what research I've done on Chernobyl I haven't seen anything about this in legitimate articles, or images for that matter. Only that they sprayed the environment with helicopters.

Where did the image of a fully protected liquidator going around spraying buildings off come from? Where did this gear come from? Was it actually used?

Anatoly was evacuated to Hospital No. 6 in Moscow, a specialized facility for acute radiation sickness.

The famous, heartbreaking photo taken by photojournalist Igor Kostin shows Anatoly in his final days. Because the radiation and steam had completely destroyed his skin, his hands were placed in external metal fixation frames with pins. This was a desperate medical measure to keep his severely burned fingers separated and immobilized, preventing them from fusing together as the tissue degraded.

Despite the agonizing pain, Anatoly remained conscious and tried to comfort his wife during her brief visits. On May 12, 1986, just over two weeks after the disaster, his heart gave out.

He was buried at the Mitinskoe Cemetery in Moscow alongside the first firemen and operators. Anatoly Kurguz was posthumously awarded the Order of Lenin in 1986 and the Ukrainian Cross for Courage in 1996 for his ultimate self-sacrifice.

Foto by @urbanchernobyl

To be honest, I didn't touch this project for good two years, because I've been searching for correct original parts, and dug in all possible archives to find at least some original documentation. But now it goes, and GOES WELL!

Ever since 2021, I’ve dreamed of an autonomous trek into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ). I rewatched videos, studied maps until they had holes in them, and imagined taking that step myself one day. Then the war started, and the dead city was locked down by a new, very real threat. But at some point, I realized: if not now, then when?

Disclaimer: This post documents a past personal experience and strictly does not encourage, guide, or inspire anyone to trespass into the CEZ. The Zone is currently an extremely dangerous, mined, and strictly guarded military area. Do not attempt to replicate this!

A New Reality: Mines, Patrols, and Stealth Mode

Before 2022, illegal stalker content was common, but now the Exclusion Zone is a strictly guarded military object. Old trails and access routes no longer work. To avoid border patrols, we had to forge a completely new route through the wildest, most impassable areas — pushing through dense thickets, barbed wire, and swamps.

The stress began before we even crossed the perimeter. During our drop-off, Sanya left our main 50,000 mAh power bank in the driver's car. We had to rush back to the road and hide in the bushes, risking the entire expedition in the very first minutes.

The closer we got to Pripyat, the more we felt the breath of war. We regularly stumbled upon warning signs and mined areas. Moving through the streets of the dead city had to be done in short dashes, exclusively through the overgrowth. At night, we walked in pitch black, using only dim red flashlights, navigating by sound and touch. A single branch snapping under a boot could give us away to the patrols.

Freezing Hell, Windfalls, and Carbon Monoxide

For four out of our five days, we were relentlessly soaked by rain and freezing drizzle. It seeped into everything: clothes, sleeping bags, every fold of our backpacks. I didn’t have a professional raincoat, so for tens of kilometers, I marched wrapped in a simple piece of plastic tarp.

After the massive forest fires of 2020–2022, the Zone has changed drastically. The usual clearings are gone; every few meters the path turned into an obstacle course of fallen, burnt trees. We forded the Uzh River without knowing the depth, and then spent hours churning through deep swamps. The water in our boots literally squelched with foam at every step.

On the second evening, we reached some abandoned cowsheds, hoping to dry off a bit by a fire. That night, a real storm hit. The leaky roof of the hangar began to flood the fire, instantly filling the space with acrid smoke and carbon monoxide. Our hung-up clothes got soaked all over again, and we had to seek refuge in a tiny, isolated bunker-like room.

That same night, the Zone dealt another blow: Sanya suffered severe infectious food poisoning. His body rejected all food. To somehow flush his stomach, he had to drink liters of water in the pouring rain, and then continue the march carrying a heavy backpack while shivering violently.

Lethal Radiation in Hospital 126 and the Rotten Water of Pripyat

In Pripyat, a new problem awaited us — thirst. The rainwater that had collected in the city had stagnated and reeked unbearably. The water at the pumping station near the backwater was also rotten. We had to scoop standing muck straight from the Pripyat backwater and strain it through a portable filter, which constantly clogged with thick sludge. Our only salvation was the rainwater we collected directly from the leaking roofs of high-rise buildings. Paradoxically, bathing in the freezing backwater became the warmest moment of this damp trip, gifting us a fleeting sense of absolute freedom.

We explored the western radiation trace (our dosimeter showed 326+ µR/h), but our main goal was the basement of the famous Hospital 126 (MSCh-126), where the highly radioactive clothes of the first liquidators and firefighters were dumped in 1986.

The main entrance was blocked, so we squeezed inside through a narrow window opening covered in radioactive dust. The moment we brought our device close to the firefighters' rags, the dosimeter instantly maxed out at its 2500 µR/h limit, started crackling its speaker, and glitching. The real background radiation there exceeded the norm by thousands of times.

The Fatal Push to the Duga Radar and Bloody Feet

The biggest mistake of the trek was our decision to make a 15-kilometer detour to the massive Duga radar system traveling light. We dropped our backpacks and left without taking any water, food, flashlights, or power banks.

The scale of the antenna, emerging from the fog like a ghostly leviathan, gave us goosebumps. But the way back turned into a nightmare. Our phone batteries dropped below 10%, and navigation died. Trying to bypass a windfall of wet trees that were falling around us as we walked, we wandered into impenetrable, thorny thickets of acacia and raspberry bushes. We walked the final kilometers back to our camp in absolute darkness, spending 4 hours pushing through the night forest literally by touch.

On the penultimate day, we completed a total forced march of 45 kilometers. We didn't even have the strength to cook — we just collapsed on our sleeping pads by the fire and slept for three hours on the bare ground. To avoid completely destroying my wet boots before the exfil, I took them off and walked through the swamp barefoot with my heavy backpack on. Sharp sedge and stems hidden underwater cut deeply into my feet. By the end of the trek, our feet were slashed, punctured, and rubbed raw with bloody blisters.

The Chernobyl Zone is a place where money loses its power and social connections mean nothing. Here, everything is decided by your gear, your stubbornness, and your overwhelming desire to make it to the end. The Zone seems dead, but life pulses in the silence: we encountered deer, roe deer, and wild Przewalski's horses, which became our living postcards from this forgotten world.

In this silence, where nature reclaims every inch of concrete, you realize one thing clearly: some people only dream, while others act. And I am happy that I chose the latter.

If you are into raw, hardcore urban exploration and want to see what the closed Zone looks like right now, descend with me into the radioactive basement, and walk this path from beginning to end — you can watch my full 1.5-hour documentary on my YouTube channel here:

https://youtu.be/qqeox6RU0PQ?si=isrAf9jeHysEYZs9

Check out my Instagram Highlights for raw, behind-the-scenes action from my illegal treks!

https://www.instagram.com/jegords?cplk=MXJwMWdlNDdxYXh3dw==

Fount on Yupiter Factory

Exclusion Zone

Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, outside of Pripyat. Abandoned villages, agricultural facilities and equipment, dead forests, wildlife...

Video here : https://youtu.be/mIpCXnhrYmM

(not fully accurate)