A RUSSIAN soldier has been killed by radiation from the destroyed Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine after his unit camped in a toxic zone nearby, according to reports. The soldier was part of a unit that captured the Chernobyl plant in the first days of the war.
The troops then occupied the 20-mile exclusion zone around the plant, where people are banned from living due to dangerous levels of radiation left over by the nuclear disaster in 1986.
Ukraine’s state nuclear company Energoatom said Russian troops had dug trenches in the radioactive mud of the most contaminated part of the exclusion zone and had received “significant doses” of radiation.
They had reportedly camped in the dangerous zone known as the Red Forest, where radiation levels are at their highest and become ill “very quickly”.
Troops also drove their trucks along dirt roads without wearing radiation gear, disturbing poisonous radioactive dust, Reuters reported