Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, Ukraine - It’s a freezing January morning, and the sun is glistening across a placid, snowy, forested landscape. But the calm is deceptive.
An air raid siren suddenly blares across the crisp winter air.
Two soldiers scour the skies, hands firmly gripping anti-aircraft guns mounted on pick-up trucks parked on a small, dilapidated bridge on a tributary of the Pripyat River.
Danger is all around, both in the surrounding land, which still carries the legacy of the 1986 Chornobyl nuclear disaster, with pockets of intense radioactive contamination, and above, where Russian drones and missiles launched from just across the border in Belarus, a short distance to the north, regularly pass overhead.
The area is known as the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ), a restricted area of approximately 30km (19 miles) in diameter, comparable in size to Luxembourg, established to contain the spread of contamination.
Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, briefly occupying the CEZ and the surrounding area, large swaths of it have become militarised, adding another layer of restriction to an already tightly controlled and hazardous environment.
Yet despite the CEZ’s many dangers, four decades on from the Chornobyl disaster, small communities of scientists, elderly returnees and soldiers have carved out lives among its abandoned buildings, while wildlife thrives in the surrounding forests.
