Newly declassified documents show that accidents occurred at Chernobyl nuclear power plant before the main disaster in 1986

Newly declassified documents show that accidents occurred at Chernobyl nuclear power plant before the main disaster in 1986

Accidents occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant before April 1986, but the Soviet Union hid them, a document from a collection titled ‘The KGB Chornobyl dossier. From construction to an accident”, which has been unveiled by the Sectoral State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine and the Ukrainian National Memory Institute.

The collection contains 229 documents, most of which are being published for the first time. 

In fact, some of the documents are the first to mention previously classified details of the Chernobyl disaster and the events preceding it. These documents were symbolically presented in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

The director of the Sectorial State Archive of the SBU and one of the authors and compilers of the publication, Andrei Kogut, said that among the documents included in the new book, there are reports of accidents that occurred in 1986, a transcript of telephone conversations at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on the night of April 26, a copy of the first transcript of the message about the accident, information about the beginning of the investigation and the order to construct the “sarcophagus.”

Chairman of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory Anton Drobovich added that these materials are able to give a better understanding of the tragedy, including the events leading up to the disaster, and reports indicating the “smaller” accidents that occurred before the main disaster, but were hidden.

This new publication is one in a series of collections of documents. The first, containing 210 documents, was published in the spring of 2019.