Free trips to the Zone for liquidators and veterans.

One liquidator stood by the bus and refused to get on: "I've been there. What would I do there?"

We got talking. In 1986 he, a soldier, was sent to Chornobyl for a month. When he came back and went for his liquidator papers, he was told: your unit has been disbanded, there is no record of you. He started knocking on doors. One year, five years, ten. He received his liquidator status in the seventeenth year. About the service itself he spoke calmly: "I served fine, nothing special." His Chornobyl trauma was not radiation, but seventeen years of fighting the system.

We hear stories like this often. The accident itself was hard enough, but the years that followed did even more harm. Liquidators were sent from one office to another, and resettled people were taken from their homes and put into strangers' apartments without any help. It was this treatment of people that turned the accident into a national-scale disaster.

That is why we take liquidators to the Zone free of charge. We hire buses at our own expense, train guides specially and pay their wages. In the spring of 2021 these trips became regular: together with Maryna Khonda of the Kyiv City State Administration, we began inviting liquidators from the lists of Kyiv's social services.

After the tour that man came up separately and thanked us for a long time. Young guides, specially prepared for such a trip, helped him close his Chornobyl chapter. For the first time he saw that his work had made a difference and that the new generation is grateful to him. One well-planned trip changed how he saw an entire period of his life.

Another liquidator, a former Prypiat resident, could not believe all the way that people were truly interested. Near Prypiat he suddenly asked the driver to stop in the middle of the forest. Behind the trees, outside the checkpoint, the town stadium is hidden, long invisible from the road. He told how he used to play football there and then ride a motorcycle to the river with friends. The tourists were amazed by a stadium you cannot see. And he was amazed at how the forest had grown over it.

Over time these trips also became rehabilitation tours for veterans of the war in Donbas. They said they had not expected such a resemblance. The liquidators had no enemy in the trenches - they had radiation. But the path of a person coming back from such work is the same. When a brother in arms from the past who has already walked that path stands next to you, it becomes easier for a new soldier.