Months before Russia invaded Ukraine, a man set up a battery-operated camera not far from the Chernobyl nuclear plant. He couldn't have anticipated what the camera captured — a rare, first-hand glimpse of the opening days of the war.
“Psychologically, it was difficult. On the one hand, we read the news with reassurance that no one would enter Kyiv. At the same time, we kept counting the number of Russian military equipment,” Yemelianenko said in an interview.
The stream of Russian military equipment just kept coming, all shown on the video monitor. Tanks, along with trucks carrying troops and communications equipment, stream along the gray road, past Yemlianenko’s booth bearing a radiation symbol and his company’s name, in English. So much Russian equipment was on the road that traffic jams developed on the way to Kyiv, 94 miles away.
After a few days, the signal was lost. Russian troops had seized the power plant, scene of the April 1986 nuclear catastrophe. But Yemelianenko and his team had already developed an alternative — a network of informants in villages near Chernobyl. Even though Russian forces already occupied these villages, the locals risked their safety to provide Yemelianenko details on the positions of military equipment.Ukrainian forces subsequently took back control of the Chernobyl plant.
The video offers a rare, first-hand glimpse into Russia’s earliest invasion moves, when the plan was to take Kyiv. Russian troops retreated from the capital in late March. Since then, Yemelianenko and his team have been volunteering in liberated villages to provide food and medicine.
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