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Comment by firstSpeaker | Hacker News Reader

Is there any hypothesis on why Russia has taken over Chernobyl so early in the war?

Easy to defend and on the shortest, most direct route from Belarus to Kiev.

This map illustrates it well: https://i.inews.co.uk/content/uploads/2022/02/SEI_89676355.j...

I heard someone on Japanese TV hypothesising that it could be used to spread the fake news that Ukraine had a secret program to build nuclear weapons. I guess of that were true, that would already have happened?

Draw a straight line from Belarus to Kyiv, it passes through Chernobyl...

It’s a strategic location with tons of radioactive material. Ukraine closed all of the exclusion zone a few days before the invasion.

At this point I think it’s about securing the site so material cannot be used in dirty bombs. If this war were go to nuclear the world has no choice but to get involved.

> so material cannot be used in dirty bombs

Or so that it can be, as part of a false flag attack. Alternatively, Russian troops could sabotage it, just to create a (bigger) ecological disaster to punish Ukraine for resisting invasion.

It may well come to this.

NPR reminded me this Saturday about suspicious bombings of Russian citizens in Russia in 1999 (300 killed) which propelled Putin into power. There's some evidence that it was a false flag operation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_apartment_bombings

false flag operations in Eastern Ukraine:

https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/false-flag-shenanigans...

Dirty bombs don’t seem like a thing you would even want to mess with. The types of materials you would need are heavy and very dangerous to handle and transport in the concentrations needed to add them to a bomb. The resulting package would be tremendous heavy and probably have to be transported by truck. The whole operation could kill anyone involved in building and transporting it.

On top of that, it wouldn’t be very effective. Most of the radioactive material would be heavy and fall out of the air quickly. Anyone covered in the dust however could shower and probably be totally fine. One the dust is dispersed it’s unlikely to be radioactive enough to form an exclusion zone.

On top of all of that, the whole world now thinks you’re a godless monster, and you might wind up in The Hague. It’s a loser of an idea.

Because it's right on the border, and it's wide defensible flat area covered in asphalt in the middle of woods.

Under "defensible" I mean there are concrete building in the areas, which is the reactor block.

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