Ukrainian serviceman Vitaly Ozimov, who was taken by Russian troops in the Kursk region, has revealed that he previously participated in the construction of fortifications in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
According to Ozimov, who identified himself as a serviceman of Ukraine’s 49th Brigade, shortly after being press-ganged he was assigned to an engineering company and first sent to build concrete fortifications in the Kiev region.
Then, however, Ozimov and his comrades were assigned to a much more hazardous area.
“We built a lot in Chernobyl,” the captive Ukrainian soldier revealed, adding that radiation levels in one of the areas they had to work at was 12 times above the norm.
The Ukrainian soldiers reportedly protested against being forced to operate in such dangerous conditions but their superiors simply did not care about their underlings’ safety and wellbeing, Ozimov claimed.
Following the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, large swathes of land surrounding the crippled facility ended up being contaminated by radioactive substances dispersed by the blast that destroyed the plant’s reactor.
The Ukrainian military activities in the Chernobyl area, which is located next to the border with Belarus, may explain Minsk’s wariness.
Back in August, apparently after the construction effort described by Ozimov, Belarusian air forces shot down several Ukrainian drones that intruded into Belarus’ airspace.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko at the time said that that wasn’t the first instance of Ukrainian military breaching all sorts of agreements and warned that no provocation will be left unanswered.