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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

What strategic purpose would taking Chernobyl have other than maybe securing the site and preventing someone from blowing a hole in the sarcophagus?

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Take a look at the map. Chernobyl sits right on the border of Belarus, 130km to Kyiv on the western side of Dnieper river.

They didn't take Chernobyl to take the reactor, they took it because it is extremely strategic if the goal is to assault Kyiv.

Also, it's a pretty unpopulated region and for that reason easier to move large forces through without trouble.

And as a minor consideration, "We captured Chernobyl, protecting you good Russians from Ukranian nuclear threats" can be used as propaganda.

This is most certainly the correct answer. It's the shortest shortcut to the enemy's capital, despite being an exclusion zone.

You hold a position to launch attacks from that are hard to counter attack.

Setup your artillery there and they can’t just shell the area back out of fear of causing a nuclear disaster.

IMO, the UN should have stepped in and taken control of the nuclear zone. There is a global risk here.

From some russian sources I’ve read that Chernobyl has been taken by Belarus soldiers, not russians. Because Belarus guys are sensitive to anything going on around Chernobyl and want to secure the site.

Isn't Belarus a dictatorship? If so, that's such a nice thing for a dictator to do.

Self interest. Belarus is one of the places that will feel the worst effects if anything happens at chernobyl

They are working as puppets for the Russians so they're essentially Russian invaders for the 90% estimation.

The Russias attack Kiev came from Belarus.

If Belarusian soldiers are involved that is a greater escalation that simply allowing Russia to invade another nation through their territory.

Belarus being a Russian pawn at the moment anything is possible I guess

I've read both reports that Belarusian military is in Ukraine, and also not. I can't find a legitimate top AP or similar report. The not sources seem to be repeating video put out from Russia so I wouldn't buy any side right now.

Either way Belarus are defacto participants having done military drills, allowing tanks to move through their checkpoints into Russia.

Regardless of whether they are or are not shooting right now, Belarus is 100% a pawn of Russia.

That is the model Putin is trying to create in Ukraine.

Well put.

Also, take the following with more than a grain of salt as I'm in no way really knowledgeable about such systems, but I would imagine both the area itself and temporarily disturbing it could be valuable as cover for nuclear weapons. One valuable tool for keeping track of them involves detecting and analyzing escaped isotope traces, and that's going to be harder to pick out and make sense of against that noisy background.

As I understand it, nuclear weaponry still features prominently in Russia's military doctrine and it's worth noting that not only the military but Russia's whole citizenry have been trained and prepared for nuclear fallout, to a much greater extent than most nations seem to prioritize today.

In addition to artillery I imagine for instance certain kinds of anti-air systems might be attractive to put on a site like that. Any further suggestions? They could have taken weeks to bring equipment in during the "military exercise" with Lukashenko's troops, so I guess few things are truly off the table.

"could be valuable as cover for nuclear weapons"

You can't hide a nuclear blast, we have satellites in orbit that detect the flash. Chech the vela incident - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_incident

"Russia's whole citizenry have been trained and prepared for nuclear fallout, to a much greater extent than most nations seem to prioritize today."

That's not been the case for like 40 years

I believe etiam means a higher level of background radiation means it's easier to move nuclear weapons, not use them.

They are not detectable anyway - if you put a nuclear warhead in a truck, there is no way to detect it from a plane or a satellite,

In fact you probably could put a nuclear bomb inside a lead-lined shipping container and send it from China to US, across all US railways, and back across the world on another ship, and probably no-one would ever know.

Also why would Russia move nukes by land through chernobil, when they have bombers and complete control of the airspace?

It is “high ground” in the sense that it can not be safely assailed.

The Chernobyl complex still houses a key power distribution center for the Ukrainian power grid, so it does hold strategic/logistical importance.

Building fear in the West.

That removes fear in the West in the context of battles raging around it. Russia has enormous nuclear capabilities, they don't need Chernobyl for anything other than to secure it from being used against them in some manner (whether stunt propaganda, or some kind of radiation threat). Chernobyl being secured by Russia relieves that risk for the West.

Isn’t it still generating electricity (with the reactors that didn’t melt down) for the region despite everything? I guess as an invader, you’d want to control the power plant.

Wikipedia says all the other reactors were used for some time after the accident, some for quite some time, but now all reactors at the site have been shut down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...

That was shutdown a few years ago. Though I suspect that there is other infrastructure still in/through the area.

Primarily roads and solid surfaces through the area allows Russians an easier way to invade in order to murder innocent Ukrainians.

It still has functioning reactors, so I’d imagine it’s the same as the time-old military strategy: secure the supply lines. In modern times, electricity is vital to an enemy’s defensive capabilities, so depriving them of it forces them to use generators with exhaustible fuel supplies.

The last reactor to shutdown was Unit 3 in December 2000. The whole facility has been undergoing cleanup and decommissioning since.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...

Drifting slightly off topic but it always seemed amazing to me that they kept the other reactors running even in the immediate aftermath of the Unit 4 explosion. Literally just down the hall, units 1, 2, and 3 ran for years afterwards. These were all manually controlled reactors that needed humans in the control room. No "working from home "on these.

I think the main reason they did that, was there was simply not money in Ukraine to build replacement power plants during the 90s after the USSR collapsed. They had no other option than to keep the plant running, or risk their entire grid collapsing. Very scary to think about having to make that decision.

Unit 3 was just behind a wall, but 1 and 2 were quite far away (300-500m).

They all had multiple serious incidents before and after the Chernobyl Disaster (1982 - partial core meltdown at #1, 1984 - incidents at #3 and #4, 1991 - fire at the turbine hall of #2). This was the most unsafe nuclear power plant in the whole USSR and the operators were in grave danger all the time.

There are still 8 reactors of the same type (RBMK) active in Russia, though they have been retrofitted with changes to reduce the risk of another Chernobyl scenario.

Blacking out a good portion of the country for years while other power plants were being built probably wasn't an option if they could more or less keep the others running.

The posh ruling elite in Moscow and StP want to deceive the West into thinking Russia is a mad dog that is too dangerous to bother. They want to scare the West from imposing total economic sanctions. They want to scare the West from supplying the Ukrainian resistance.

Always remember Russia is a rational actor no matter how much Putin and Lavrov are fear mongering about sanctions leading to a nuclear WW3. The French foreign minister was the first to call out their bluff yesterday. I hope more Western leaders will follow.

I'd point out that being irrational in order to scare the west into thinking you're irrational is still an example of being irrational.

We can only call their bluff so many times before they feel the need to demonstrate that they are indeed willing to be crazy. Which they've done here with this whole Ukraine situation.

I wish I knew how to tell.

In game theory there are games that the crazy person wins. "Chicken" is the most famous. If both players are crazy, both lose. Unfortunately the discipline offers no way of diagnosing insanity. Committing to what looks like a crazy plan can be rational. Putin's speech on Monday certainly seemed unhinged, but he might be a good actor.

Chernobyl has a nice road that happens to be the shortest road between Kyiv the Ukraine capital and Russia. It also still has several active reactors only 1 of them melted down so that gives some strategic merit byt the road is 99% of it.

All reactors at Chernobyl have been shutdown since 2000. I have been amazed lately at how many people are unaware of this and think Chernobyl is still an operating nuclear power plant.

It's quite crazy though that they left it running for 14 years after making the area around it inhabitable and causing fallout over whole Europe

It is pretty crazy. I would assume that they really needed the energy it was producing, although I admit that I don't have much further knowledge on the topic.

I had the opposite perception and thought no reactors were active since the explosion.

It was long one of those "surprising fact" sorts of things.

A few weeks ago there's a cartoon where a guy sits in front a computer, and a speech bubble above him says "After 2 years of being an epidemiological expert, I am now a geo-political expert."...

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