Chernobyl-GAU Kiev resident survives 37 years in radiation zone
The night of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant ruined all future plans for the then 28-year-old worker Mychajlo Bukow and his family with their two young sons.
21.04.2026, 12:06
21.04.2026, 13:56
SDA
At three o'clock in the morning on April 26, 1986, a colleague rang his doorbell and said: "Misha, something's happened at the power plant". It was 40 years since the biggest disaster in the civilian use of nuclear power. Bukov remembers the chaos of that time at a meeting in Kiev, which has now been fighting the Russian war of aggression for more than four years.
"Nobody knew anything, the phones were switched off. I had no idea what could have happened," says the now 68-year-old in the prefabricated housing district of Teremky on the southern edge of the Ukrainian capital. He is wearing jeans and a leather jacket; his shoulder bag also contains memories from his life. He shows his ID cards.
For more than 37 years, Bukov worked in the radioactively contaminated exclusion zone around reactor 4, which exploded on that fateful night, in order to eliminate the consequences of the accident. Bukov is one of hundreds of thousands of so-called liquidators who were tasked with cleaning up after the communists in the Soviet Union. The Russian-born electromechanic came to Ukraine in the early 1980s to work on the construction of the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant.
A good life in Pripyat - but the joy is short-lived
The prospect of an apartment in the modern power plant town of Prypyat brought him to the new Chernobyl nuclear power plant. "Ten minutes by bike to work. 300 meters to the Prypyat River and you could already fish," Bukov recalls. "It was all just wonderful." But the joy didn't last long.
The day after the accident at the nuclear power plant, the authorities evacuated the prefabricated housing estate. "We stood outside our house for two hours, my wife with our six-month-old baby in her arms and a suitcase," he recalls. They only had the bare essentials with them. The evacuation is only supposed to last two days. They would never see their belongings again. They stayed with his parents until September, when they were given a three-room apartment in Kiev as Chernobyl evacuees. Bukov and his wife still live in the 18-storey prefabricated building today.
Robots clean up the contaminated machine room
Bukow reports back to his company at the time. "Voluntarily, of course," he says. He moves into a hostel in the town of Poliske, around 50 kilometers from the power plant, and travels to Chernobyl every day with the other liquidators. They erect concrete works for the construction of the temporary sarcophagus above the fourth reactor.
He shows old photos on his tablet. "Here's our old brigade. Half of them are no longer alive." At the time, around 800,000 liquidators from all over the Soviet Union were helping to clean up the consequences of the nuclear disaster and build the concrete sarcophagus.
Because Bukow had a degree in radio engineering, he moved to a specialist robotics company in the winter of 1986. Together with robot specialists from what was then Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), he helped with decontamination. They maintain and repair remote-controlled bulldozers and robots that are used to remove the debris. And they are also clearing the radioactive engine room of the destroyed reactor. "There were a lot of contaminated metal structures there. Including graphite components. We took them out," says Bukow.
Despite the war, he is still in contact with his Russian colleagues from St. Petersburg via the Internet. "We respect each other," he explains; for him personally, that is quite human.
Bukov and his wife live alone after the death of their sons
Just over a year after the start of the war, when Russian troops also initially occupied Chernobyl, Bukow said goodbye to the power plant in June 2023 and retired. As Chernobyl victims, he and his wife Tetjana would undergo thorough medical examinations every two years. Bukow suffers from varicose veins and a slipped disc, while his wife has struggled with thyroid problems since the disaster. "She has to take pills all the time".
But the hardest blow for the couple came when they lost their sons one after the other. "The baby we were holding in our arms during the evacuation died at 19." As he recounts this, he struggles to keep his composure. The cause of death: "Sudden cardiac arrest." His older son, born in 1979, died at 38. "In short, we now live with my wife as a couple and from pension to pension," he says. The couple have to get by on the equivalent of around 350 euros - including the Chernobyl surcharges.
After Chernobyl comes life with Russia's war
Bukow wrote the book "The Robots of Chernobyl" - to improve his pension. But since the pandemic and the Russian war, there are no more Chernobyl tourists and therefore hardly any buyers.
At the moment, the harsh winter of war with the Russian attacks on the power plants is still in his bones. When the heating breaks down, the temperature in his apartment drops to below ten degrees. With the constant air alarms, he and his wife seek shelter in the bathroom or in the hallway. "You can't run anywhere from the 16th floor, especially as the elevator can always break down."
Nevertheless, Bukow and his wife don't want to leave Ukraine. Their home, friends and acquaintances are in Kiev. The 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster is a "day of mourning" for him: "Hardly any of my peers and older people are still around."
