Down an overgrown country road, three startled wild horses with rugged coats and rigid manes dart into the flourishing overgrowth of their unlikely nature reserve: the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
Thirty-five years after the world’s worst nuclear disaster — an anniversary commemorated in the former Soviet country on Monday next week — surging flora and fauna have taken over deserted residential blocks, shops and official buildings topped with communist icons.
Ukrainian authorities say that the area might not be fit for humans for 24,000 years, but for now, this breed of wild horse has thrived.
Photo: Reuters
“It’s really a symbol of the reserve and even the exclusion zone in general,” said Denys Vyshnevsky, an official at the Chernobyl Radiation and Ecological Biosphere Reserve.
The explosion in the fourth reactor at the nuclear power plant on April 26, 1986, left swathes of Ukraine and neighboring Belarus badly contaminated, and led to the creation of a no-man’s-land within a 30km radius of the station.
Dozens of villages and towns were evacuated, turning the area into a giant reserve unprecedented in Europe by its size.
More than three decades after the incident, there has been an influx of visitors to the area, spurring authorities to seek official status — and protection — from UNESCO.
Since the disaster, the area has become a haven for elk, wolves — and the stocky, endangered breed of wild horse native to Asia, Przewalski’s horse.
The breed, named after Russian scientist Nikolai Przewalski, who discovered it in the Gobi Desert, became all but extinct by the middle of the 20th century, partially due to overhunting.
It was reintroduced by scientists to areas of Mongolia, China and Russia as part of preservation efforts.
In a different program, 30 of the horses in 1998 were released into the Chernobyl zone, replacing an extinct horse native to the region.
The experiment was soon halted, but the horses remained and now number about 150 in the exclusion zone, with another 60 over the border in Belarus.
“Paradoxically, this is a unique opportunity to preserve biodiversity,” Vyshnevsky said.
Under the right conditions, the Ukrainian herd could eventually increase to 300 or even 500 animals, said Sergiy Zhyla, a researcher at the reserve.
Researchers at Prague Zoo participating in the conservation efforts say that the global population of Przewalski’s horses has grown to 2,700.
Following the success in Chernobyl, there is discussion over introducing other endangered species, such as the European bison.
“We’ll be able to recreate the landscape that was here before humans began intensely exploiting the region,” he said.
Kouri Richins, a Utah mother who published a children’s book about grief after the death of her husband is to serve a life sentence for his murder without the possibility of parole, a judge ruled on Wednesday. Richins was convicted in March of aggravated murder for lacing a cocktail given to her husband, Eric Richins, with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl at their home near Park City in 2022. A jury also found her guilty of four other felonies, including insurance fraud, forgery and attempted murder for trying to poison her husband weeks earlier on Feb. 14, 2022, with a
‘PERSONAL MISTAKES’: Eileen Wang has agreed to plead guilty to the felony, which comes with a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison A southern California mayor has agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government and has resigned from her city position, officials said on Monday. Eileen Wang (王愛琳), mayor of Arcadia, was charged last month with one count of acting in the US as an illegal agent of a foreign government. She was accused of doing the bidding of Chinese officials, such as sharing articles favorable to Beijing, without prior notification to the US government as required by law. The 58-year-old was elected in November 2022 to a five-person city council, from which the mayor is selected
DELA ROSA CASE: The whereabouts of the senator, who is wanted by the ICC, was unclear, while President Marcos faces a political test over the senate situation Philippine authorities yesterday were seeking confirmation of reports that a top politician wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) had fled, a day after gunfire rang out at the Philippine Senate where he had taken refuge fearing his arrest. Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, the former national police chief and top enforcer of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs,” has been under Senate protection and is wanted for crimes against humanity, the same charges Duterte is accused of. “Several sources confirmed that the senator, Senator Bato, is no longer in the Senate premises, but we are still getting confirmation,” Presidential
HELP DENIED? The US Department of State said that the Cuban leadership refuses to allow the US to provide aid to Cubans, ‘who are in desperate need of assistance’ US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday said that Cuba’s leadership must change, as Washington renewed an offer of US$100 million in aid if the communist nation agrees to cooperate. Cuba has been suffering severe economic tumult led by an energy shortage that plunged 65 percent of the country into darkness on Tuesday. Cuba’s leaders have blamed US sanctions, but Rubio, a Cuban American and critic of the government established by Fidel Castro, said the system was to blame, including corruption by the military. “It’s a broken, nonfunctional economy, and it’s impossible to change it. I wish it were different,” he told
RSS