A Chernobyl Widow’s Tragedy, Forty Years Later

Nataliia Khodymchuk’s last evening at home was like many that had come before. She stayed in the neat confines of her three-bedroom apartment in Kyiv, slicing garlic to preserve and knitting socks and scarves to send to Ukrainian soldiers. She moved slowly; the November light faded outside her windows as the darkness of early winter crept in. Typically, Nataliia called her daughter around dinnertime, but she wasn’t feeling well that night and decided to settle in early, on a patterned green couch in the hallway. She called the corridor, with its two thick walls, her “bunker.” It was her best protection from Russian air strikes.

Nataliia, who was seventy-three, lived on the seventh floor of a blocky Soviet-era apartment building on Kyiv’s Left Bank, not far from a power station. Locals called the complex the “Chernobyl House” because it was largely populated by families who had been displaced from the Soviet city of Pripyat, in 1986, following the nuclear disaster. Nataliia’s husband, Valerii Khodemchuk, had been the first person killed in the meltdown, and he was the only victim whose remains were never recovered—his body was lost in the nuclear reactor, buried beneath thousands of tons of concrete and steel. He was thirty-five years old.

Nataliia raised their two children, Larysa and Oleh Khodymchuk, as a single mother. Both now lived abroad with their own children. Larysa, who is fifty-three, had moved with her husband to Belarus, in 1991; Oleh, who is four years younger, had relocated his family to Germany after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Nataliia’s age was catching up with her. Her knees, back, and hands ached. She found it difficult to get around and refused to go to a shelter when Kyiv was under attack, which had become an almost weekly occurrence. Still, she managed to travel by train to her dacha, just outside the city, each summer. The house was rudimentary, with an outdoor toilet and no heating, but she felt most at home working in its garden.

Nataliia had made many visits to Chernobyl over the years. Her husband’s former colleagues had bolted a memorial plaque to him on the wall between the third and fourth reactor units. Radioactivity levels were too high to stay for longer than a few minutes, and staff always rushed her away. But she felt him there. In two weeks, she planned to return for a special photo shoot in preparation for the commemoration of the disaster’s fortieth anniversary, which is on April 26th. She’d remained devoted to her husband for decades, handing down his memory to their children; donating his medals to the Chernobyl Museum, in Kyiv; and giving interviews about him to journalists, even when she’d rather decline. “You have to pass that pain through yourself every time,” Larysa told me. “But still she agreed. . . . It was her cross.”

Nataliia kept a framed portrait of Valerii on the living-room wall of her apartment. His face was unblemished by the passage of time. Smooth skin, thick eyebrows—just as she remembered him. She told her family that he often appeared to her as she slept. Sometimes in comfort; other times in warning.

That night, at around 1 A.M., Kyiv’s air-raid sirens began to wail. Hundreds of Russian drones were descending, each the size of a Jet Ski, accompanied by more than a dozen missiles. Explosions shook the city. One of the drones, with a hundred pounds of explosives packed in its nose, slammed into the seventh floor of the Chernobyl House; Nataliia’s living-room window was its bull’s-eye. Her children later wondered whether it had flown off course, and was perhaps intended for the nearby power plant. “Mathematically, it felt almost impossible,” Oleh later told me. “If you calculate it against the size of the city, the number of apartments, the population, it’s like one chance in several million. And yet, that’s exactly what happened.”

Nataliia grew up as the third of four children, in the village of Kopachi, where her family raised livestock and grew their own food on state-allotted land. As a child, Nataliia thrashed rye and wove flowered rugs on a loom. Clothes were washed outdoors in a heavy barrel called a zhlukto, or carried to a nearby stream. In winter, she and her siblings dragged their laundry on a sled and cut holes in the ice. Nataliia and her sister, Mariya, who was two years younger, were particularly close. “We did everything together,” Mariya Melnyk, who is now seventy-one, said.

As teen-agers, the sisters conspired to get jobs in a cafeteria in nearby Pripyat. It was there, sometime in 1970, that Nataliia met Valerii, an Army veteran from Kropyvnia, a village forty miles to the southwest. Both had bought into the Soviet Union’s vision of Pripyat as a gleaming new city that would accompany the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Valerii, who worked in the plant’s boiler house, and hoped to one day be promoted to one of its reactor shops, was taken by Nataliia’s gentle beauty, practicality, and work ethic. They would walk to the bus stop together after their shifts, then began meeting to dance at a community center in Kopachi. After a few months of dating, he asked her parents for permission to propose. They married in April, 1971. Nataliia was nineteen; Valerii was twenty. They didn’t bother with wedding rings.

Their first home together was a prefabricated trailer. Later, after Pripyat became more developed, Nataliia and Valerii were assigned to a two-bedroom apartment on Lesi Ukrainky Street, not far from where Nataliia’s sister lived. Nataliia and Valerii papered the walls in bright patterns and planted cosmos in the front yard. Pripyat, which was officially declared a city in 1979, grew to a population of around forty-nine thousand people. Dozens of children attended Larysa and Oleh’s kindergarten. After school, the siblings liked to climb in a willow that was in front of their home, hiding from their parents beneath the sweep of its branches.

Valerii doted on his son and daughter. He’d grown up without a father and was intent on giving them a different childhood. They hunted for porcini mushrooms with their dog and went cross-country skiing in the forest. In the summer, they went on road trips in Valerii’s white Moskvitch sedan to the Sea of Azov, or went camping by the “Kyiv Sea,” as the vast reservoir near the Ukrainian capital is known. They often spent weekends with Nataliia’s extended family in Kopachi. Larysa, Oleh, and their cousins would scale apple trees and bite into unripe fruit, hard and green. In the fall, the adults would find rotten crescents in the harvest.

Nataliia and Valerii sometimes went days without seeing each other. When Nataliia was in her early twenties, she got a job as an operator at a water pump station across the street from their home; often, she finished her shift as Valerii started his, in the evening. He’d been promoted to work in one of the nuclear plant’s circulation-pump rooms and then became a senior operator in the pump hall of Chernobyl’s newest reactor, known as Unit 4. Its façade was covered with white tiles that gleamed in the morning light. Valerii was recognized for his prior work in Unit 2 and earned a prestigious award. His portrait was hung up on the city’s honor board. Nataliia invited friends and family over to celebrate, and served stewed potatoes with meat and mushrooms. “Our family was born together with Pripyat and the Chernobyl station,” Larysa said. “We were among those who were creating something new, something completely different from what existed before.”

In the spring of 1986, Nataliia and Valerii celebrated their fifteenth wedding anniversary. That April, Valerii decided to sell his Moskvitch in Kyiv. The transaction would likely take hours—given the registration process, the necessity of sharing a shot of vodka with the new owner, and the bus ride back to Pripyat—and Valerii thought he might not return in time for his midnight shift. A friend and colleague of his, Oleksandr Zelentsov, who was scheduled to work the following morning at 8 A.M., agreed to trade shifts with him.

But the sale went more swiftly than expected. Valerii gave the car’s new owner an icon of a protective saint, which he usually kept tucked into the car’s front panel. He was back in Pripyat by dinnertime. He called Zelentsov and told him not to worry about the trade. Zelentsov, who is now seventy-five, told me, “If I had gone, then you would not be talking to me now. You would be talking to him.”

Valerii warned Nataliia that it was going to be a hard night. His reactor unit was being prepared for maintenance. During the process, on orders from Moscow, operators would be testing the turbines’ backup power system. “We’ll be shutting down the reactor,” he told her.

Nataliia was watching a romance film on television. It was her day off. The children—Larysa was thirteen; Oleh was nine—were in bed. She mulled over the plot of the film and turned to Valerii as he was heading out the door. Their initial meeting in the cafeteria seemed long ago. She asked him, “Did you marry me for love or convenience?”

“For love, of course,” he told her.

He kissed her goodbye and promised to return.

It was nearing midnight when Valerii arrived at Chernobyl. He started changing into his work uniform and stashed his shirt and pants in a locker. But he noticed that the starched white fabric of his uniform was dirty. Valerii was meticulous and detail-oriented, often to a fault. His colleagues ribbed him about this type of behavior; he requested a new uniform and changed again.

Valerii’s first task each evening was to read the operational log. He saw that the emergency core-cooling system, which would pump water to the reactor to prevent an explosion, had been taken out of service. Valerii asked the senior operator on duty, Mykhailo Rybochkin, whose shift was ending, why the emergency system was down. Rybochkin said that the unit’s chief engineer had ordered it. Valerii asked for more information about the scheduled test and grew increasingly agitated by the vagueness of Rybochkin’s answers. Valerii refused to sign the log and accept his shift; Rybochkin couldn’t go home until he did. “It went all the way to the shift supervisor of the reactor shop,” Rybochkin said, in 2020, in an interview for a Ukrainian documentary. “I started calling him, saying, ‘Either I stay on the shift, or he accepts it, because my bus is about to leave, and that’s it.’ ”

Their supervisor called Valerii and told him to sign the log. They needed to start the test and couldn’t hold it up on his behalf. “Something was bothering him,” Rybochkin said, of Valerii. “I tried to explain that everything was fine, the unit was already operating at half power, they would shut it down, and that would be that. He signed. I left around five minutes past midnight.”

About an hour and fifteen minutes later, Valerii noticed that the water-circulation pumps, designed to remove heat from the reactor core, were violently shaking. He walked to the pump hall to investigate the issue, then called the control room for help. An uncontrollable rise in heat was causing the water to vaporize. The reactor had failed to properly shut down.

Valerii’s call was interrupted by an explosion so powerful that it ripped off the reactor’s roof. Flames stabbed the air. Radiation pumped into the night sky. Valerii was likely crushed by debris in the initial explosion. Still, his colleagues spent hours searching for him, peering through a haze of radioactive steam and smoke that would eventually kill some of them. After their shift ended, the next group kept searching. By that evening, they’d all but given up. Two workers were dispatched to tell Nataliia.

Nataliia had been looking for Valerii since morning, when her sister came over with news of the explosion. Nataliia had gone to the bus station, where soldiers were spraying foam to contain the nuclear fallout, and to the hospital, where men in white coats were unloading victims on stretchers from the backs of ambulances. She went to the morgue and stood on a box so she could see through a tall window at the pale bodies inside. None of them were her husband. The phone lines to the plant were down. She gave up her search and went home.

Valerii’s colleagues arrived soon after. They told her that he was missing and asked if she wanted them to keep looking. Nataliia could feel that he was gone. “If my children are now orphaned, then let other children keep their fathers,” she told them.

The next day, Nataliia was washing the landing outside of her apartment with vinegar, as advised by officials, when an evacuation order was issued. Authorities instructed residents to leave their pets and not take anything more than what was needed for three days, at which point they were told they could return to Pripyat. To locals, Soviet leaders seemed to be downplaying the severity of the explosion. To the international community, they outright denied the incident, and prohibited the release of any information about Chernobyl. But a radioactive cloud was wafting across Europe, setting off alarms in a Swedish laboratory nearly seven hundred miles away and slowly sickening tens of thousands of people. As evidence mounted that Moscow was lying, Ronald Reagan, then on a state visit to Japan, remarked that the Kremlin’s “handling of this incident manifests a disregard for the legitimate concerns of people everywhere.”

Nataliia boarded an evacuation bus with Larysa and Oleh, who still recall the treasured items they left behind: a stuffed monkey, a doll, a remote-controlled car. For a time, the family stayed with Valerii’s mother in Kropyvnia. Nataliia told her mother-in-law that Valerii was in Moscow for medical treatment, a lie that she maintained until May, when Mikhail Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party, announced on a newscast that Valerii had been one of two fatalities at Chernobyl—the only deaths that Gorbachev acknowledged in his speech.

That summer, Larysa and Oleh were sent to camp in Crimea. Nataliia returned to Chernobyl to continue her work at the water-pump station for a few weeks, and earned the title of “liquidator,” but Pripyat, poisoned and emptied, would never again be her home. The family moved to Kyiv before school started in the fall, resettling in a block of apartments that had been hastily reserved for families like theirs, edging out others who had been languishing on the housing list. Other students taunted Larysa and Oleh, calling them “Chernobyl hedgehogs” and starting rumors that they were radioactive. Nataliia found a job in a dormitory, issuing bed linens to residents. She tried to get Valerii’s death certificate issued, which would bring closure as well as extra income as his widow, but it was virtually impossible without a body. “After the accident, we were scattered far apart,” her sister Melnyk, who eventually moved with her husband to a village southeast of Kyiv, told me. “Everything was taken: our land, our families, and even the last place where we could return and remember.”

Still, Nataliia tried to make their new apartment a home. She bought furniture and hung the portrait of Valerii. She never forgot the soft curl of her husband’s dark hair, his dimpled smile, or the timbre of his voice. During the following decades, she was often asked whether it was time to find a new partner. She wasn’t interested in remarrying. Valerii had promised to return.

Chernobyl, once a popular tourist destination, has been closed to most visitors since Russian troops, crossing into Ukraine from Belarus, briefly occupied the plant four years ago. But this winter, after weeks of planning and multiple requests, the Ukrainian government allowed me to visit with a photographer and fixer named Serhiy Morgunov. We drove two and a half hours north from Kyiv, through a checkpoint, and into the exclusion zone.

The Ukrainian military still maintains a presence at Chernobyl, closely guarding the infrastructure and protecting one of the main roads to Kyiv from another Russian assault. But on the day we visited, all was quiet, the landscape wild and untamed. A decade ago, the Ukrainian government carved a nearly nine-hundred square-mile ecological biosphere reserve out of the exclusion zone, encouraging the recovery of native species and vegetation. Populations of lynx, brown bears, and moose have since rebounded.

As we approached Pripyat, the arched spine of a steel container grazed the sky. The protective structure, which looks like a giant airplane hangar, was pitched over the destroyed reactor in 2016 to prevent radioactive leaks. The life span of the “New Safe Confinement” arch is only a hundred years. Then a new structure will need to be built, and so on, for millennia. When we arrived, the workers and engineers were still talking about a Russian drone that had slammed into the arch in February, 2025, sparking a fire and threatening another nuclear disaster. Moscow denied the attack.

We checked in at Chernobyl’s main office and were given dosimeters that would monitor the radiation levels accumulating in our bodies. After we signed liability waivers acknowledging the risk, a government-appointed guide climbed into our car, and we set out for Lesi Ukrainky Street. Larysa and Oleh had described a very different Pripyat to what I saw. The city of their childhood was idyllic. They could buy bananas and tangerines at the grocery store, seemingly unaffected by the rationing that strangled other cities in the Soviet Union. New Year’s Eve brought music and dancing to the central square. There were accordions and tambourines, and a giant fir tree that, one year, toppled under its own weight. Now, as we drove deeper into Pripyat, we found a jungle where there was once a city. Trees grew on the roof of the Polissya Hotel, which once housed nuclear scientists; at the Palace of Culture Energetik in the city’s center, frozen rain collected inside of a decrepit swimming pool. Our Geiger counter, which took live measurements of the environment, clicked quietly.

We parked near Nataliia’s former workplace, the water-pump station, which is still in operation. The operator on shift that day, a squarely built fifty-eight-year-old man, with close-cropped gray hair, remembered Nataliia from one of her visits to Valerii’s monument. He was born nine miles away and, though he was forced to evacuate as a teen-ager, he still considered Chernobyl his “fatherland.” He worked ten-day shifts at the station to stay connected to the place where he’d grown up. Across the street, through a thick tangle of forest, the Khodymchuks’ building stood tall and gray in the snow. The willow out front, where the children used to play, was thick and crooked with age. Our guide cautioned us to watch our step as we entered the building. The foundation was crumbling. On the door of a first-floor apartment, a message was written in marker: “We remember you.”

Larysa had said their apartment was just up the stairs and to the left. Serhiy, my photographer and fixer, stopped to study a bank of mailboxes in the stairwell. He saw Valerii’s name— faded but still legible—on apartment 39. We climbed to the second floor. The Khodymchuks’ front door was thrown open. An icy wind blew through the buckled windows. The bright wallpaper that Nataliia and Valerii had hung was sloughing off in layers, green giving way to roses. Broken furniture was piled in a front room. A bouquet of dead flowers, wrapped in plastic and tied with a blue ribbon, rested on the sink in the kitchen.

That night, as we drove through the exclusion zone and back to Kyiv, we passed what remained of Kopachi, the village where Nataliia’s family had lived for generations. The houses, deemed radioactive, had been levelled and buried, along with the apple orchard. Only mounded hills remained. After the accident, Nataliia and her sister had taken a walk to say goodbye to their ancestral land. Strolling across a small bridge, they recalled the chore of wintertime laundry. The stream rushed by, as clear and inviting as the nearby lake that their father forbade them from swimming in. Deep marshes concealed quicksand, he told them. If they stepped in, they’d never be able to leave.

This land, now dotted with Russian mines, is currently inaccessible. After Russia’s invasion and illegal annexation of Crimea, in 2014, Nataliia couldn’t visit her husband’s ceremonial grave, in Mitinskoe Cemetery, in Moscow, either. She’d fought for Valerii to receive a headstone there in 1998, alongside twenty-seven other plant workers and firefighters who had died in the blast or from radiation poisoning. She interred a shirt that Valerii had worn in the days before his last shift. She could never bring herself to wash it, hoping to retain the scent of him.

Larysa and Oleh had accumulated other losses at the hands of Moscow. Oleh had moved from Ukraine to Germany, in part, to give his son, who was then seventeen, a life that wasn’t dictated by Russia’s war. His five-year-old daughter, Valeriia, named after her grandfather, was growing up in a country that wasn’t her own. Meanwhile, Larysa was stuck in Belarus, a country allied with Russia that Nataliia despised and had refused to move to, despite her daughter’s many pleas. “We have now lost everything,” Larysa told me. “We are now in the same state that Mom once was. To lose your home, your native land, that’s like falling from a bridge into a huge abyss with no way back. Now we have no way back either. We had Mom, we had a home, an apartment—somewhere to come back to. Now there is nothing.”

The drone’s explosion incinerated the doors of Nataliia’s apartment. Smoke spiralled upward through the floors above. “There was nothing left to breathe,” one neighbor later told me. Outside, flames streaked across the darkness. Window frames littered the pavement. Car alarms wailed in a parking lot. Nataliia, protected by the walls of her hallway bunker, was mostly unscathed.

She stepped outside and met her next-door neighbor, Iryna Butina, in the external corridor of their two apartments. Butina, who, at thirty-six, was undergoing cancer treatment, had a thirteen-year-old daughter and a seventeen-month-old son. Nataliia tried to open the door that led to their floor’s elevator and stairwell, but the blast had jammed it shut. “She said we had to put out the fire in her apartment,” Butina told me. “I asked, with my child in my arms, ‘With what?’ ”

Nataliia, moving as quickly as she could, went back inside her apartment. What little she had left of Valerii—his portrait; his leather belt in the front closet; photo albums showing everything she’d left behind in Kopachi and Pripyat—risked catching flame. She had filled her tub with water in preparation for utility cuts after an attack. She scooped up the bathwater with her hands and poured what she could on the fire, but it was futile. The flames overtook the apartment—and her with it. Her hair burned. The skin on nearly half her body blistered and seeped. She gave up on trying to save her home.

In the hallway, the door was still jammed. Butina kept trying to pry it open. Smoke roiled the air, thick and black. She felt like she was choking. She’d sent her daughter and son back into their apartment to wait, telling them to breathe out an open window. Butina prayed. “I said, ‘God, please, I don’t want to see my children die. Help me open this lock.’ And at that moment it opened.”

It felt like a miracle. Butina moved her children into the stairwell, away from the flames. Just then, Nataliia reappeared. She was barefoot and in shock. Her nightgown had melted. She asked Butina to call an ambulance. Butina told Nataliia that they needed to leave. Nataliia hobbled down seven flights of stairs, stopping briefly on the third floor to borrow slippers and a sweater from a friend to cover her pink skin. She draped a shawl around her head. Once outside, Nataliia slid into the back of an ambulance and was rushed to the nearest burn center. She died early the next day; six other people were killed in the attack. The Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, called it a “new tragedy caused once again by the Kremlin.”

News of Nataliia’s death spread quickly across Ukraine, a nation that is, by now, mostly inured to the nightly tick of deaths. Last year was the deadliest for civilians since 2022, the start of the full-scale war, with more than 2,500 fatalities, up thirty-one per cent from the previous year, despite Moscow’s insistence that the Russian Army does not target civilians. Nataliia’s death sparked a period of national grief. I scrolled through black-and-white photos of Nataliia posted by local news stations. There she was standing in a grocery store with her sister, round-cheeked and young, or reclined in the snow next to Valerii, in Pripyat.

A few days after the attack, workers arrived at the Chernobyl House to nail plywood over the gaping windows of Nataliia’s apartment, which was blackened with soot. The updraft knifed through the building, whose inhabitants were already suffering without heat or power for much of the winter as Russia pounded Ukraine’s energy system. Nataliia’s neighbors took stock of what had survived: some stray potatoes on the balcony; a few blouses; a book about nuclear power, the spine cracked open to an essay by the Soviet atomic-reactor pioneer Nikolai Dollezhal, “The Birth of Peaceful Nuclear Energy.”

Nataliia was buried in her sister Melnyk’s village, southeast of Kyiv. This spring, Melnyk will seed marigolds, chrysanthemums and lavender at the site. Nataliia’s children won’t be there to see them bloom. “How did that fragile woman carry all of this?” Larysa said. “I only understood it later, with age—when I got married myself, when I arranged my own home, when I had children. The weight she carried inside herself.”

Days after Nataliia’s death, one of her old friends, a fellow evacuee from Pripyat, brought a bouquet of flowers to Chernobyl in her honor. The friend placed them on Valerii’s memorial, telling him that, finally, “Nataliia is with you.” ♦