The initiative to create a museum of liquidators' machinery in Prypiat.

The idea was simple: bring the surviving liquidators' vehicles together in one guarded place. When the Prypiat motor transport depot was closed and only a few buildings and a fence remained, Yaroslav Yemelianenko thought: this is it.

The project was approved by the Exclusion Zone Agency. With a drone we traveled the entire Zone - burial grounds, forests - and documented the machinery that still survived. The plan was for several dozen vehicles to stand on the site: with perimeter security, lighting, video cameras, signs and the story of each one.

The state enterprises did not even have money for transportation. The ISU-152 self-propelled gun, which worked here as a bulldozer in 1986, had stood near the ChNPP all these years, and people had already started cutting it up for scrap little by little. We paid for fuel for the Agency's service vehicles, and they moved it to the site in Prypiat. We told journalists about the future museum on press tours.

Then our participation started being blocked. For the 35th anniversary of the accident, the state structures of the Zone opened an exhibition of machinery in Prypiat - without us, without security and without lighting.

Half a year later it emerged that someone had painted the ISU-152 pink. For us it was a complete disappointment. Anything of historical value must be guarded, and we had built that into the project from day one. Machinery gathered in one place without guards is even easier to destroy. And a project should be completed together with the people who came up with it.

This was meant to be a modern museum of our memory. So far it has turned out differently.