Can You Visit Chernobyl? Inside Ukraine's Silent Zone
Chernobyl went from a place people fled to a place tourists paid to visit. Before Russia's full-scale invasion, you could take a day trip from Kyiv to see what a nuclear disaster had left behind.
And there was far more to see than a ruined reactor. The old tours took in an abandoned city, a huge Soviet radar, and forests growing over land where people once lived and worked.
Ordinary tours are now suspended.
Can You Visit Chernobyl Now?
The exclusion zone, usually called the Zone, surrounds the plant. Reporting from April 2026 confirms that wartime access remains restricted.
The plant does have an approval process for technical teams and the media. Those are professional visits with special permission, so an old tour listing or a working booking form won't get you in.
Read current government travel advice before planning a trip to Ukraine. The Zone now has military and explosive hazards as well as radiation risks, and anyone offering an unofficial shortcut should be avoided.
A Safety Test Goes Wrong
The disaster began during a safety test at Reactor 4 on April 26, 1986. At 1:23 a.m., faults in the reactor's design and decisions made during the test caused a sudden surge of power.
Explosions and fire followed, sending large amounts of radioactive material into the surroundings. Firefighters and plant workers rushed to deal with an emergency they did not yet fully understand.
Only three kilometers away, nearly 50,000 people lived in Pripyat. The city had been built for plant workers and their families, but its residents weren't evacuated until the following afternoon.
The evacuation soon reached far beyond Pripyat. By the end of 1986, about 116,000 people had been moved out of their communities.
The animated reconstruction below follows the test, the explosions, and the response.
For the longer account of what happened and why, there's Midnight in Chernobyl.
- Reconstructs the Chernobyl disaster through reporting and firsthand accounts
- Adds crucial context before reading about the exclusion zone and its legacy
- A gripping history for readers who want more than disaster tourism
The City Left Behind
Pripyat was just sixteen years old when it was evacuated. Founded in 1970, it had schools, shops, sports halls, a cinema, and apartment blocks for its residents.
It also had plans for the coming week. A new amusement park, complete with a yellow Ferris wheel, was due to open for the May Day celebrations on May 1.
The city was evacuated on April 27, four days before the planned opening. The wheel stayed behind, along with the empty swimming pool, classrooms, and homes that later became familiar sights on Chernobyl tours.
Despite the name of those tours, Pripyat and Chernobyl are two different places. Chernobyl is an older town farther south, which later became a base for people working inside the Zone.
On official Ukrainian pages, you'll see the name written as Chornobyl. It refers to the same place as Chernobyl, the spelling also widely used in English.
Pripyat, meanwhile, began to fall apart. Rain got into buildings, plants spread, and looters took what they could.
Years of visitors changed it too. Some objects were moved or arranged for photographs, so a scene in an abandoned classroom may owe as much to a later visitor as to the people who used it.
Putting a Cover Over the Disaster
While residents were being moved away, workers faced a different problem at the plant: how to cover the wreckage of Reactor 4.
They built a steel-and-concrete structure known as the Shelter in just 206 days. It was a huge emergency effort, but the cover was never meant to be the final answer.
Decades later, engineers built an even larger structure nearby and slid it over the old Shelter. This steel arch is called the New Safe Confinement.
The arch was designed to hold radioactive material inside while giving crews space to take apart unstable sections of the Shelter beneath it.
So even after the reactor had been covered twice, the work wasn't finished. A drone strike in 2025 would make that job harder still.
The Radar That Wouldn't Stay Quiet
The reactor wasn't the only enormous piece of Soviet technology on the old tour route. Hidden in the forest, Duga looks like someone built a steel wall and forgot to stop.
It was part of an early-warning system designed to detect missile launches far beyond the horizon. But while the radar itself was tucked away, its signal was anything but discreet.
A rapid tapping sound broke into radio broadcasts around the world, earning Duga the nickname “Russian Woodpecker.” For years, listeners could hear it without knowing what made the noise.
What Happened After People Left?
Elsewhere in the Zone, whole buildings had disappeared. After the village of Kopachi was evacuated, most of its wooden buildings were knocked down and buried to try to contain radioactive material.
A few brick and stone buildings remained above ground. Low mounds and warning signs marked places where others had stood.
Nearby, the fallout had killed a stretch of pine trees and turned them reddish brown. That gave the Red Forest its name.
Yet as people stayed away, forests also spread into former farmland. Plants pushed through roads and grew around empty buildings, while wolves, deer, birds, and other wildlife lived across the area.
It can look like nature has put the disaster behind it. But wildlife and lasting contamination exist together: radioactive material remains in the surroundings, even where animals have returned.
Nor did the people disappear completely. Behind the checkpoints, engineers, scientists, firefighters, and plant workers still had work to do.
The 60 Minutes report below visited the Zone in 2014. This archive footage shows the abandoned places alongside the people whose working lives continued there.
The book Inside Ukraine: A Portrait of a Country and Its People looks beyond the Zone at the country around it.
- Introduces Ukraine through the faces and stories of its people
- Offers visual context for the country beyond breaking-news imagery
- A substantial gift for readers drawn to contemporary Ukrainian life
When War Reached the Plant
On February 24, 2022, Russian forces seized the plant on the first day of the full-scale invasion. They used the site as a military base, while the staff responsible for it could no longer change shifts as usual.
Those workers had to stay on for exhausting stretches. Damage to power lines and limits on access added to the strain.
Russian forces left at the end of March. The plant's account of the occupation describes damaged facilities, stolen equipment, and the pressure placed on its staff.
Then, on February 14, 2025, a drone hit the huge steel arch over Reactor 4 and started a fire. The structure built to help deal with the old disaster now needed restoration itself.
In an update dated April 14, 2026, the plant said the arch could no longer maintain a full seal. It also reported that the site remained under control and that no releases above regulatory limits had been recorded as of that date.
Work to restore the arch continues. Forty years after the accident, keeping Reactor 4 contained is still an active job.
For Ukraine's longer story, there's The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine.
- Traces Ukraine from its earliest history through the modern independent state
- Explains why Kyiv stands at the center of the Eastern European story
- A strong foundation for understanding Ukrainian identity, borders, and politics
If Chernobyl Tours Return
Any future trip depends on Ukrainian authorities reopening tourist access and setting new rules. Wait for that decision, use an authorized operator, and follow the checks and protective measures required at the time.
Stay with your guide, keep out of abandoned buildings, and leave objects where they are. A schoolbook or a street sign belongs to the place and the people who lived there.
For now, the reconstruction and archive footage above offer a way to follow the story. One shows how the disaster unfolded; the other shows why leaving the city did not mean leaving the disaster behind.
