Forty years in the shadow of the reactor: Belarus and the legacy of Chernobyl

Last month, 26 April, 2026, marked exactly forty years since the worst nuclear disaster in human history. For Belarus, this anniversary is not just a date on a calendar. It’s an open wound, carried in the soil, the air, the memory of its people, and increasingly, in political decisions that reveal a painful and almost unbearable irony.

The country that got hit the hardest

When Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded on 26 April, 1986, the epicentre was in Soviet Ukraine. But the wind carried the radioactive cloud northward, straight into Belarus. This small Soviet republic absorbed roughly 70% of all Chernobyl’s radioactive fallout.

The scale of destruction was staggering. Radiation contaminated 56 districts across the country. Around 2,650 square kilometres of farmland were permanently taken out of use. Nearly a quarter of Belarus’s entire forest area was contaminated. In 1988, the most affected regions, are Bragin, Narovlya, and Khoiniki, were turned into the Polesie State Radioecological Reserve, a place where people never came back, but nature did, quietly mutating on its own terms.

It took three full years after the explosion (until July 1989) for the Belarusian Soviet parliament officially to declare the entire territory of the republic an ecological disaster zone.

The human cost

The health fallout from Chernobyl has been long-lasting and complex. The most clearly documented consequence was a massive spike in thyroid disease, especially among children. In the Homel region, the hardest-hit area, thyroid cancer rates among children surged approximately a hundredfold after the disaster.

But the damage wasn’t only physical. The shock of forced evacuation, of leaving behind homes and entire communities overnight, triggered waves of anxiety, depression, and cardiovascular disease. The psychological trauma turned out to be just as real as the radiation itself.

The government responded by building a network of 12 children’s rehabilitation and health centres, and in 2003 opened a National Research Centre for Radiation Medicine in Homel. These were important steps. But they were never the whole answer.

The children of Chernobyl and Europe

From the early 1990s, hundreds of thousands of Belarusian children from contaminated areas travelled to Europe and the United States for health recovery stays. In Ireland, Italy, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Scotland, host families offered what children couldn’t get at home: clean air, proper food, medical check-ups, and sometimes simply the experience of seeing a different world.

By some estimates, at least 500,000 Belarusian children took part in these programmes over the years. One of them was a 14-year-old girl from the Homel region who visited Ireland for the first time in 1996. Her name was Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who would later become the leader of the Belarusian democratic opposition.

But this story was never straightforward. As far back as December 2008, President Lukashenko signed a decree banning organised group travel of Belarusian children to the US and EU countries. The trigger was a handful of teenagers who, while on recovery trips abroad, refused to go home. The official justification claimed that exposure to Western life was giving children the “wrong” ideas. Some countries, like Italy, managed to negotiate separate agreements and keep their programmes running for a while.

Then came 2020. After a disputed presidential election, mass protests swept Belarus and were brutally crushed. The EU imposed waves of sanctions. Minsk responded by closing the door on European civil society organisations. Those same NGOs, volunteer groups, parish communities, and ordinary families had been running children’s health trips for decades – not governments, but people who simply wanted to help.

In 2023, Belarusian authorities formally disbanded the “Children of Chernobyl” public association. Today, health programmes in Scotland, Ireland, Italy, and Spain have effectively been suspended. The children these programmes were designed for didn’t suffer because of Western sanctions. They suffered because of decisions made by their own government.

Forty years after the disaster, children from Chernobyl-affected areas have lost something their parents and grandparents took for granted – the chance to spend even a month breathing air free from the reactor’s shadow.

Going nuclear, again

And here is where the story takes a turn that feels almost too bitter to be real.

As Belarus marks the 40th anniversary of history’s worst nuclear catastrophe, the country is actively building up its own nuclear energy sector and planning to go even further.

The Belarusian Nuclear Power Plant in Astravets (Ostrovets), built using a Russian loan of $10 billion, was connected to the grid in 2020. Today, its two reactors with a combined capacity of 2,400 MW supply around 40% of the country’s electricity. Official statements are triumphant: the plant is “reliable”, “safe”, and “economically sound”.

Independent experts aren’t so sure. The loan that funded construction still weighs heavily on the Belarusian economy. Electricity prices for consumers have risen more than 13% since 2018, despite officials promising in 2018 that launching the plant would not lead to higher bills. And there’s a problem with where the electricity goes, the Baltic states refused to import power from Belarus once the plant came online, and Lithuania officially cut commercial imports in November 2020. Belarus is generating more electricity than it can sell.

Despite all this, in September 2025, Lukashenko publicly announced plans to negotiate with Putin over building a second nuclear power plant, potentially in the east of the country, partly to supply electricity to Russia’s Bryansk region. In November 2025, discussions at the Presidential Palace also included a third reactor at the existing Astravets site. And in January 2025, a location south of Mogilev was floated as a possible site for the new station.

According to Belarusian environmental outlet Green Belarus, the expansion plans raise serious questions: the first debt isn’t paid off, there are no reliable export markets for surplus electricity, and consumer prices are already climbing, exactly as critics warned they would.

The lesson that wasn’t learned

Chernobyl happened partly because the Soviet system was incapable and unwilling to acknowledge risk and tell the truth. Information was suppressed. The scale of the disaster was downplayed. Evacuations were delayed. The first maps showing radiation contamination in Belarus weren’t published until February 1989, nearly three years after the explosion.

Today’s Belarus is building new reactors with money borrowed from the same country whose reactor poisoned its land four decades ago. It is doing so under political conditions with no independent environmental oversight, no free press to ask uncomfortable questions, and no civil society organisations left to push back. The groups that spent decades helping children from affected areas have been shut down.

The accident of 26 April, 1986 was a lesson in what happens when governments prioritise ambition over transparency, and power over people’s safety. Forty years later, Belarus appears to be sitting the same exam and choosing the same answers.

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