Radiation and chemical safety trainings.

The occupation of the ChNPP and the threats of nuclear weapons suddenly made our knowledge necessary for the army. The most dangerous thing in a nuclear or chemical strike is not knowing what to do. So that is what we started teaching.

We began simply: Yaroslav Yemelianenko recorded a video guide on gas masks, and we handed dosimeters to the Hospitallers and held our first training for them. Sergii Mirnyi held a session with National Guard soldiers. Then came the Dniprovets 1 volunteer battalion, teachers and rescuers of Slavutych, the counter-sabotage company of the 112th Territorial Defense Brigade and the Kyiv police.

The trainings covered how to act in the first minutes, when to stay in a shelter and when to leave the affected area, how to choose and check a gas mask, and what to do about white phosphorus burns.

For deminers we developed a separate course. The main rule of the Zone is not to dig and not to raise dust, and demining is impossible without both. Explosives experts of the National Police who work in Kyiv, the region and the Chornobyl Zone learned how to protect themselves in this work, how to check for radioactive particles on clothing, on the skin and inside the body, and whether americium-241 is something to fear.

After the trainings soldiers often came up to say thank you. Many of them had not understood what radiation was before, and the news was frightening them with nuclear weapons. It mattered to them to hear: even if russia uses nuclear weapons, it is not surrender and not the end of the fight. Understanding how it all works and what to do calmed them and gave them strength to keep fighting.

Later we began traveling to the positions of the soldiers who hold the defense in the Chornobyl Zone itself. We handed the Armed Forces equipment and our own map of all the zones of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, which we had developed back in 2014.

Trainings for the Defense Forces are free of charge.