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About 70% of the radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl disaster landed in Belarus, heavily<span style="color: Red;">*</span>contaminating one-fourth of the country, one-fifth of its agricultural land<span style="color: Red;">*</span>and affecting at least 7<span style="color: Red;">*</span>million people. More than 2,000 towns and villages were evacuated, and about a half-million people have been relocated since 1986, according to Chernobyl International, a humanitarian organization with links to the United Nations.<span style="color: Red;">*</span>The group estimates that Chernobyl costs Belarus 20% of its annual budget.<span style="color: Red;">*</span>
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The border town of Belarus may have suffered the worst when nearly 70 percent of the radioactive fallout landed there. KIm Hjelmgaard, USA TODAY
<span style="color: Red;">*</span>
SUDVOKO, Belarus<span style="color: Red;">*</span>—<span style="color: Red;">*</span>Igor Buynevich and Nikilay Kotlyarchuk were observing a regular<span style="color: Red;">*</span>Sunday in a scruffy border town in Belarus<span style="color: Red;">*</span>by preparing to drink<span style="color: Red;">*</span>vodka behind a small grocery store and pass<span style="color: Red;">*</span>banter back and forth.
It was 8 a.m., sunny but frigid<span style="color: Red;">*</span>cold. Chernobyl’s nuclear power plant lay less than 4 miles away.
Buynevich<span style="color: Red;">*</span>was leaning on a bike with a homemade storage box fastened on<span style="color: Red;">*</span>back. Three bottles of vodka and a half-empty bag of hard candies were neatly packed inside.
Nikilay Kotlyarchuk on March 6, 2016.
(Photo: Kim Hjelmgaard, USA TODAY)
They said they were waiting for friends to join them.
“Many of us in the area have cancer or diabetes,” said Kotlyarchuk, 35, an art teacher in Sudvoko’s school.
He earns about $150 per<span style="color: Red;">*</span>month, a sum he said was not enough to prosper on<span style="color: Red;">*</span>but kept him from starving.
"At least two-thirds of the kids where I teach can’t do physical exercise because if they fall down it is a very real possibility they will break a leg or worse,"<span style="color: Red;">*</span>he said, then offered some vodka.
A derelict house inside the Exclusion Zone in Belarus.
(Photo: Kim Hjelmgaard, USA TODAY)
"Our lives are not good,"<span style="color: Red;">*</span>he said. "It’s the same for all in this region. It’s the secret everyone knows."
As he spoke, Kotlyarchuk placed one hand on the bike to help keep it upright. He said he did not know how many people were ill from Chernobyl and the government never spoke about it, or if it did, it was only to say everything was normal.
Kotlyarchuk did not think everything was normal.
"We are in this position because of Chernobyl, but what can we do about it?"<span style="color: Red;">*</span>he said. "Even after all these years, we know nothing."
Belarus is not known for rolling tumbleweed and the sound of dry, hollow<span style="color: Red;">*</span>wind.<span style="color: Red;">*</span>But that image<span style="color: Red;">*</span>would not be out of place in Sudvoko. A handful of dogs were heard in the distance, the village’s wide but featureless main street seemed to have no central focal point.<span style="color: Red;">*</span>There were no cars and little<span style="color: Red;">*</span>sign<span style="color: Red;">*</span>of the town’s few thousand inhabitants.
Rural Belarus, near the border with Ukraine.
(Photo: Kim Hjelmgaard, USA TODAY)
"We often joke that some of these sick kids have three legs,"<span style="color: Red;">*</span>said Buynevich, 36. He works for an energy firm and earns about twice what Kotlyarchuk does. "Although I haven’t seen that myself."
Buynevich said he<span style="color: Red;">*</span>believed, although he admitted he had no way of knowing for sure, that<span style="color: Red;">*</span>children<span style="color: Red;">*</span>born after the accident<span style="color: Red;">*</span>are<span style="color: Red;">*</span>now seeing the most medical problems.<span style="color: Red;">*</span>(Buynevich and Kotlyarchuk were 5<span style="color: Red;">*</span>and 6, respectively, at the time of the accident.)
Neither man wanted<span style="color: Red;">*</span>to discuss his own health in detail, or that of his family.
Recent independent field research by Greenpeace concluded that<span style="color: Red;">*</span>harmful isotopes such as cesium-137 and strontium-90 have decreased considerably in Belarus since 1986, but they persist<span style="color: Red;">*</span>in economically depressed towns like Sudvoko.
Many<span style="color: Red;">*</span>inhabitants continue to eat fruit and vegetables, fish, mushrooms and berries cultivated in areas<span style="color: Red;">*</span>exposed to radiation.
"Did you know they eat cheese from this region in Poland and Russia?"<span style="color: Red;">*</span>Buynevich said.
Radioactive materials are also redistributed by forest fires.
Last year, Buynevich said, a forest fire on the Ukrainian side of the border combined with high winds<span style="color: Red;">*</span>caused radiation<span style="color: Red;">*</span>here to spike as much as 50 times the average level. He<span style="color: Red;">*</span>knew that only because his brother works as a guard in the<span style="color: Red;">*</span>Polesie State Radioecological Reserve, Belarus' Exclusion Zone.
No one in the town had any way of measuring it.
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