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 he was recorded as the first death from the largest nuclear disaster in history. Almost four decades later, his widow, Natalia Jodemchuk, died last Saturday, aged 73, in a kyiv hospital: the night before, a Russian drone bomb hit her apartment while she was sleeping.
The fire has left a black stain on the seventh floor of the building, around what was Jodemchuk’s home. It is a 20-story residential block, a mass that rises on the urban limits of kyiv. Some of the families that were displaced from Pripyat, a municipality neighboring Chernobyl, were relocated there. Pripyat is today a ghost city, frozen in time, famous for being a pilgrimage site for disaster tourism.
Jodemchuk was moved from Pripyat to kyiv, just over 100 kilometers south of the nuclear power plant, with almost nothing on her clothes, 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 employees of the atomic plant, 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 colleagues from the plant,” explains Voloshina, taking a break at the bar she runs in the neighborhood. This man, who died in 2024, was one of the first “liquidators”, plant employees who in the aftermath of the disaster prevented new explosions. One of the best-known liquidators, Oleksi Ananenko, also resided in Jodemchuk’s building.
Both Ananenko and Vitali Jodemchuk are figures that appear in the acclaimed television series Chernobylbroadcast on HBO in 2019.
The bombed building is part of a neighborhood that was 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 her face still shows the anguish of what happened on November 14. That morning, Russia fired more than 400 Shahed drone bombs against the Ukrainian capital. 14 impacts were recorded in civil buildings. One of these Shahed was the one who killed Jodemchuk, the seventh fatality of that bombing.
Voloshina believes that the drone’s target was an electrical substation near the neighborhood. Russia is carrying out a campaign to destroy the Ukrainian energy system that 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, leaving her home with half her body burned. “She saved her two children by forcing the door of the apartment into the flames,” says Voloshina, fighting back tears. “She was alone because just the day before, her husband was sent to the army.” This neighbor is one of the 36 people who were injured in the Russian bombing.
Natalia Jodemchuk was known in Ukraine for her activism to remember the victims of the nuclear disaster, the State Agency for the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone highlighted in a statement. The president, Volodymyr Zelensky, also dedicated a message to her on his social networks: “Almost four decades later, Natalia died from a new tragedy caused by the Kremlin. Ukrainians who survived Chernobyl, who helped rebuild the country after the disaster, once again suffer the danger and terror of an aggressor state.”
Jodemchuk had the same profile as other women interviewed by Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich in her acclaimed Voices from Chernobyl. This book also includes testimonies from children whose lives were completely changed by the catastrophe: “I was little, I was eight years old,” said 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 bathing, of diving into the water… Afraid of everything. Plucking hazelnuts in the forest. Picking up a beetle with my hands, because the beetle walks on the earth, and the soil was contaminated. The ants, the butterflies, the 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 it does so on the same floor and in the same building in which Natalia Jodemchuk died. He survived, with his hands still shaking from the trauma, 24 hours after the incident, because his apartment faces the opposite side of the drone impact. Shinkaruk and a friend unload repair materials that they transport in a van. On November 14, he says with a nervous smile, he turned 48.
Were you also trembling with nerves when the atomic catastrophe occurred? “I can’t compare it,” 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 even had two hours of class. But then they told us that we had to go home.” “What happened now has affected me much more,” he admits, “especially the humming of the Shahed, you hear how it is getting closer, you feel helpless, you don’t know who it will hit.”
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