Valeri Jodemchuk literally evaporated on April 26, 1986 when reactor 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded. Valeri was in the reactor water circulation pump room. His body was never found, but it was recorded as the first death due to the largest nuclear disaster in history. Nearly four decades later, his widow, Natalia Jodemchuk, died last Saturday, at the age of 73, in a hospital in Kiev: the night before, a Russian drone bomb had hit her apartment while she slept.
The fire left a black stain on the seventh floor of the building, around what was Jodemchuk’s home. It is a 20-storey residential block, a mass that rises on the city limits of Kiev. Some of the families displaced from Pripyat, a municipality near Chernobyl, have been relocated there. Pripyat is now a ghost town, frozen in time, famous for being a pilgrimage site for disaster tourism.
Jodemchuk was transferred from Pripyat to Kiev, just over 100 kilometers south of the nuclear power plant, with almost nothing on her person, with the few belongings that the Soviet army allowed them to pack before leaving their home forever. He made the trip together with other families of nuclear power plant employees, such as Marina Voloshina’s father-in-law. “Natalia was an icon, we all knew her, but my father-in-law was also remembered as a hero, he saved his colleagues at the plant,” explains Voloshina, taking a break in the bar she manages in the neighborhood. This man, who died in 2024, was one of the first “liquidators”, employees of the plant who avoided new explosions in the aftermath of the disaster. One of the most famous liquidators, Oleksi Ananenko, also resided in Jodemchuk’s building.
Both Ananenko and Vitali Jodemchuk are characters who appear in the acclaimed television series Chernobylbroadcast on HBO in 2019.
The bombed building is part of a neighborhood built in just over a year to house Chernobyl evacuees. The block is one of the settings of the famous documentary The Chernobyl bellfrom 1987. This film by director Rollan Sergienko caused a shock in the Soviet Union. Both the nuclear catastrophe and the end of the invasion of Afghanistan were crises that accelerated the disintegration of the USSR.
Voloshina lives on the sixth floor of the building and the anguish over what happened on November 14 is still visible on her face. That morning, Russia launched more than 400 Shahed drone bombs against the Ukrainian capital. 14 impacts in civilian buildings were recorded. One of these Shaheds was the one who killed Jodemchuk, the seventh victim of that attack.
Voloshina believes the drone’s target was an electrical substation near the neighborhood. Russia is waging a campaign to destroy Ukraine’s energy system which is causing power outages of up to 14 hours a day in the country’s large cities. For her, the worst memory of that morning was seeing one of her neighbors, a friend of hers, leave the house with half his body burned. “He saved his two children by forcing the door of the apartment into flames,” Voloshina says, holding back tears. “She was alone because just the day before her husband had been sent to the army.” This neighbor is one of the 36 people injured during the Russian bombing.
Natalia Jodemchuk was known in Ukraine for her activism in memory of the victims of the nuclear disaster, the State Agency for the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone highlighted in a statement. President Volodymyr Zelenskyj also dedicated a message to her on his social networks: “Almost four decades later, Natalia has died due to a new tragedy caused by the Kremlin. The Ukrainians who survived Chernobyl, who contributed to rebuilding the country after the disaster, once again suffer the danger and terror of an aggressor state.”
Jodemchuk had the same profile as the other women interviewed by Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich in her acclaimed Voices from Chernobyl. This book also contains the testimonies of children whose lives were completely changed by the catastrophe: “I was little, I was eight years old – says one of them – I was afraid of running barefoot in the grass. My mother scared me by telling me that I was going to die. I was afraid of taking a bath, of diving into the water… Scared of everything. Picking hazelnuts in the woods. Picking up a beetle with your hands, because the beetle walks on the earth, and the soil was contaminated. The ants, butterflies, flies, everything was contaminated.
This child could have been Oleksandr Shinkaruk. When the Chernobyl reactor exploded, he was also eight years old and living in Pripyat. Today he does it on the same floor and in the same building where Natalia Jodemchuk died. He survived, his hands still shaking from the trauma, 24 hours after the crash, because his apartment faces away from the drone’s impact. Shinkaruk and a friend unload repair materials and transport them into a van. On November 14, he says with a nervous smile, he turned 48.
Were you also shaking with nerves when the atomic catastrophe occurred? “I can’t make comparisons,” says Shinkaruk, “that night we saw a flash of light in the sky, but nothing more. And the next day we went to school. They gave us some iodine pills and we also had two hours of lessons. But then they told us we had to go home.” “What happened now affected me much more,” he admits, “especially the buzz of the Shahed, you feel how it is approaching, you feel helpless, you don’t know who will strike.”
