Several hundred Russian troops have been withdrawn from the Chernobyl nuclear facility in Ukraine after suffering from “acute radiation sickness” and are being treated in Belarus, according to reports.
The Pentagon confirmed earlier that the Russian forces began to pull out from the defunct facility, which was taken on the first day of the invasion, after a pledge by the Kremlin to scale back its offensive.
But an employee at the Public Council at the State Agency of Ukraine for Exclusion Zone management said the soldiers had fled while “irradiated” and bused to a medical facility in Gomel, Belarus, the Mirror reported.
“Another batch of irradiated terrorists who seized the Chernobyl zone was brought to the Belarusian Radiation Medicine Center in Gomel today,” Yaroslav Yemelianenko wrote on Facebook.
“Have you dug trenches in the Red Forest, b—hes? Now live the rest of your short life with this. There are rules for handling this area. They are mandatory because radiation is physics — it works regardless of status or shoulder ranks,” he wrote.
“With minimal intelligence in command or soldiers, these consequences could have been avoided,” Yemelianenko added.
Word about the sickness came soon after Ukrainian officials claimed that Russian troops “looted and destroyed” a specialist laboratory containing “highly active” radioactive samples from the decommissioned nuclear plant.
The lab contained “highly active samples and samples of radionuclides that are now in the hands of the enemy,” the stage agency said in a Facebook post, referring to unstable atoms that release radiation.
The Ukrainian agency had said it hoped Russian troops “will harm [themselves] and not the civilized world.”
President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Russia of using the exclusion zone around Chernobyl to prepare new attacks.
A US official told Agence France-Presse this week that Russian troops were “walking away from the Chernobyl facility and moving into Belarus. Chernobyl is (an) area where they are beginning to reposition some of their troops — leaving, walking away from the Chernobyl facility and moving into Belarus.
“We think that they are leaving. I can’t tell you that they’re all gone,” the official added.
Meanwhile, the head of Ukraine’s state nuclear company said Thursday that the UN nuclear watchdog will establish online monitoring missions to the Russian-occupied Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia plants.
Energoatom CEO Petro Kotin said the International Atomic Energy Agency should use its influence to ensure Russian nuclear officials do not interfere in the operation of nuclear plants occupied by Russian forces.
“(The IAEA) can influence this and they must influence this, and this question will be discussed,” Kotin said.
He said he could not disclose all the results of a meeting he had Wednesday with visiting IAEA chief Rafael Grossi.
