Marking the site of the 25th liquidator brigade camp.

In the middle of a forest, far from any road, Sergii Mirnyi stopped and said: "Here."

In 1986 this was the field camp of the 25th Radiation and Chemical Protection Brigade - about three thousand people who were liquidating the consequences of the accident. The brigade included a separate radiation reconnaissance battalion, and one of its platoons was commanded by Mirnyi. His men crossed the Zone first and measured the radiation levels. In the evening they came back here to wash, eat and rest.

23 years had passed, but he recognized everything. He led us from spot to spot: here was the canteen, here the cinema - fragments of its walls still stand, here were the tents, and here the vehicles, BRDMs and other machines. On the pad where the vehicles used to stand, a dosimeter still shows slightly elevated levels.

Mirnyi explained why. The reconnaissance crews often drove around the decontamination points: they knew a vehicle might fail the radiation check. And giving up a working vehicle to a burial ground felt to them like burying a brother in arms. So the machines were driven into camp the back way. He talked about those days with enthusiasm, remembering every detail.

We decided this place must not be lost. Yaroslav Yemelianenko made the sign and painted it himself, in his own kitchen. It reads:

"A sign of people's memory. From May 1, 1986 to 1990 (?) this was the field camp of the 25th Radiation and Chemical Protection Brigade - a large military unit that fought the consequences of the Chornobyl explosion of 26.04.1986. The brigade numbered about 3,000 men and included a separate radiation reconnaissance battalion."

The question mark is on the sign itself: nobody has found in the archives exactly when the camp was closed.

The sign was put up by Sergii Mirnyi, Yaroslav Yemelianenko, Oleksii Breus - an operator of the Unit 4 control room - and Oleh Veklenko, a graphic artist who served in this very brigade as a second lieutenant in the summer of 1986. They were helped by the "first landing party" of designers who had come for the Chornobyl-25 brainstorm.

This sign was the start of what later became a separate line of our work: marking the places where liquidators worked, while there is still someone left to tell about them. Within three years, foreign students were already coming to see it.

After the occupation of 2022 we found the sign broken. Yaroslav took it away, and it is now kept in our warehouse - battered, but whole.