Slavutych (Ukraine) (AFP) - The town of Slavutych returned with the launch of the Russian invasion of Ukraine more than four years ago, as a refuge for those fleeing the war, just as it was a refuge for those fleeing the Chernobyl nuclear disaster forty years ago.

Published on: 04/26/2026 - 16:13

The town, which was built as a “Soviet paradise” for refugees, with its huge theatres, stadium, schools, hospital and identical concrete architecture, represented a model of the Soviet Union’s concept of “friendship of peoples”.

After the explosion of the Chernobyl reactor on April 26, 1986, workers and architects from eight Soviet republics - Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine and Russia - participated in the construction of the town at record speed, after hundreds of thousands in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia were forced to leave their homes as the radiation resulting from the worst nuclear accident ever spread.

Thus, residents of Pripyat, the city near the Chernobyl reactor, moved to Slavutych, where hundreds of people gathered at 1:23 am on Sunday, the time when the reactor explosion occurred.

"All residents over the age of 39 are internally displaced," Slavutych mayor Yuri Fomichev told AFP.

Soviet welcome

In the city that was designed to accommodate 50,000 people, today about 20,000 live.

According to Mykola Kalashnik, head of the administration in the Kiev district, to which Slavutych belongs, about 1,265 people were displaced to the town in northern Ukraine due to the war.

However, this number represents only a small percentage of the 3.7 million people that the United Nations says have been internally displaced as a result of the Russian attack, noting that Russian forces occupied the city for several days in March 2022.

Olga (50 years old), who lives in the town with her elderly and disabled mother, says, "People here have been through a lot, and they understand what we are going through." Four years ago, Olga was forced to flee Energodar, which was home to workers at the Zaporizhya plant, the largest civilian nuclear facility in Europe.

She and her mother spent 18 months with a family in Zaporizhya, which is still under Russian control, before they moved to Slavutych in 2024, where they got a new apartment.

According to Bernadette Casteel-Hollingsworth, representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Ukraine, every Ukrainian family has been “affected” in one way or another by the displacement caused by the war.

With help from the government and the United Nations, a kindergarten and part of a hospital were restored and converted into residential apartments for displaced people.

Among them is Katerina Romanenko (40 years old), who left the destroyed city of Bakhmut in the Donetsk region, shortly before Russian forces took control of it in 2023.

Romanenko expresses her happiness with her home in Slavutych, which she says is “the most positive experience” in this war, noting that she does not pay rent, but only electricity and services costs.

For her part, Olena Tolstova (74 years old) still feels the burden of war. “I want to go home,” she says, pointing to her apartment in Energodar and her small country house in the suburbs.

Tolstova, a widow, lives in a hospital residence in Slavutych, after spending several months at the home of a friend of hers who worked in Chernobyl.

Although she wanted to leave Slavutych, she acknowledged that she had received assistance based on the Soviet principle of "friendship of peoples."

© 2026 AFP

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