The creator/writer/director has a podcast where this was discussed. He opted to have the actors speak in their natural accent so that the actors don't act to the accent but instead act to the situation. I may be doing a bad job explaining it but he said something along the lines of actors starting to take on stereotypical traits when doing an accent, and he wanted to focus more on the reactions to the situation at hand.

I believe you are referring to the HBO miniseries, Chernobyl.

The showrunners explained in a podcast that in auditions, characters used Slavic accents but ended up becoming distracting and could have ended up comical.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2T6ldM41ZbVzuEaL644sef?si=1...

So Soviet characters that speak English with a slavic accent would be less distracting? Surely if you are bothered by this they should be speaking Russian with English subtitles.

But was it more distracting than the actors attempting a bad accent, and the affect that would have on their overall performance?

I hate it when movies try to portray foreign language speakers as speaking accented English. That’s not how any of this works!

If they want to go for accuracy, the actors should speak the actual language. Provide subtitles for outside audiences.

Otherwise, just have the actors speak normally. It’s no less authentic than speaking with an accent, and the actors can focus on acting.

Another prominent Soviet example of doing this well is The Death of Stalin. You actually get a sense of the people as real people instead of scary foreigners.

I wish they had gone with the actual language + used subtitles, it really destroys the immersion.

Somebody, please explain me, why out of blue it became fashionable to put that native-sounding flavour of an accent in games and movies even when its story assumes almost every character in it is a native speaker?

I always find it disturbing. As every native Russian speaker, I tend to feel it perceive as beautiful and melodic. Just as any other Russian, Ukranian, Greek or whoever else. Sounds like a joke and not a good one. Makes me skip the whole title.

Why are they doing it? Does it really help anybody with immersion?

I speak with Russian accent, and most of the time I find the representation of it by English actors extremely laughable.

Being from around those parts, and remembering the time when the accident happened (watching the evening news with my father when they admitted publicly to the disaster and my father shaking his head and saying "hell, if they admitted to this much, the reality must be 10x as worse"). Anyway, I'd have to say the lack of accents were not even noticeable because the acting, the scenery, even down to small details like the clothes, haircuts, paint color schemes were are just incredibly well done.

Yeah they took some liberty with condensing multiple characters into the Khomyuk character, but even she was believable.

It's actually very distracting that most of them speak a perfect british accents. I was quite confused at the beginning whether british engineers or scientists were actually working for Russia or Ukrainian at the time.