Saving the liquidators' machinery from destruction and a field seminar in the Zone.

The vehicles the liquidators worked with in 1986 stood for decades in the vehicle dumps of the Zone. Then they started being cut up for scrap metal. Along with the machines, the physical evidence of what it cost to stop the accident was disappearing.

Many of these machines have their own history and even their own names. The cabs are lined with lead, the windows have lead glass - so the operator would receive a lower dose. There is nothing like this anywhere else in the world.

From 2012 we fought for them. We went to protests - with posters, together with scientists and other people who cared - and publicly defended the country's right to its heritage against being cut up for ferrous scrap for a quick profit. We compiled an inventory of all the liquidators' machinery in the Zone that has cultural value and personally handed the head of the Exclusion Zone Agency a letter: this is what must be saved immediately.

Within a few months the machinery began to be destroyed even faster - and exactly according to that list. At Yaniv station all the liquidators' engineering obstacle-clearing vehicles were cut up. The Rozsokha vehicle dump turned into an empty lot, although its photo still hung on the Agency's website.

But the publicity did its job. The cutting was halted, and some of the machines survived - in Prypiat and elsewhere in the Zone.

That same spring we took the next step. Together with the State Agency of Ukraine for Exclusion Zone Management and the State Scientific Center for the Protection of Cultural Heritage from Man-Made Disasters, we held a "seminar on wheels" in the Zone. Two buses carried members of parliament, officials from ministries, the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, the tourism business, ecologists, journalists and students. The only table all day was the lunch table in the ChNPP canteen.

They were shown Prypiat, the plant, the Chornobyl-2 antennas, the arch of the New Safe Confinement and what remained of the heavy machinery. The conclusion was sobering: the Zone has countless valuable sites, but nobody has counted them and nobody protects them. On the way back to Kyiv a brainstorm started right on the buses, and a working group was formed there and then. It was from this group that the idea of putting the Zone on the UNESCO list grew.