Twenty years after the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl, the grass here is tall and green, the wild birds thick in the skies. And the lands are inviting. Coal miners from the dirty eastern Donbass region near Russia have moved here to escape the choking grey air that gave them asthma, black lung and other respiratory diseases.

But it is a bastard Eden, a lush and fatal paradise whose...
more »

Twenty years after the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl, the grass here is tall and green, the wild birds thick in the skies. And the lands are inviting. Coal miners from the dirty eastern Donbass region near Russia have moved here to escape the choking grey air that gave them asthma, black lung and other respiratory diseases.

But it is a bastard Eden, a lush and fatal paradise whose soil, water, trees and frogs are laced with radiation.

?The air is fresh. The sky is clear. Much better than the east,? says Viktor Popovichenko, 62, a retired coal miner. With his wife and savings, Viktor moved here from Donbass and bought a ramshackle wooden village house for the equivalent of 400 US dollars.

He plans to die here, from the asthma or radiation poisoning from the mushrooms he picks in the field. This spoiled land of Chernobyl is his refuge, the sacred Ukrainian heartland where myths abound. A place Lenin wanted to expunge and Stalin almost succeeded in starving to death. It?s still here. And now people have chosen this land of certain death to give them the illusion of a future.
« less