Ever since 2021, I’ve dreamed of an autonomous trek into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ). I rewatched videos, studied maps until they had holes in them, and imagined taking that step myself one day. Then the war started, and the dead city was locked down by a new, very real threat. But at some point, I realized: if not now, then when?

Disclaimer: This post documents a past personal experience and strictly does not encourage, guide, or inspire anyone to trespass into the CEZ. The Zone is currently an extremely dangerous, mined, and strictly guarded military area. Do not attempt to replicate this!

A New Reality: Mines, Patrols, and Stealth Mode

Before 2022, illegal stalker content was common, but now the Exclusion Zone is a strictly guarded military object. Old trails and access routes no longer work. To avoid border patrols, we had to forge a completely new route through the wildest, most impassable areas — pushing through dense thickets, barbed wire, and swamps.

The stress began before we even crossed the perimeter. During our drop-off, Sanya left our main 50,000 mAh power bank in the driver's car. We had to rush back to the road and hide in the bushes, risking the entire expedition in the very first minutes.

The closer we got to Pripyat, the more we felt the breath of war. We regularly stumbled upon warning signs and mined areas. Moving through the streets of the dead city had to be done in short dashes, exclusively through the overgrowth. At night, we walked in pitch black, using only dim red flashlights, navigating by sound and touch. A single branch snapping under a boot could give us away to the patrols.

Freezing Hell, Windfalls, and Carbon Monoxide

For four out of our five days, we were relentlessly soaked by rain and freezing drizzle. It seeped into everything: clothes, sleeping bags, every fold of our backpacks. I didn’t have a professional raincoat, so for tens of kilometers, I marched wrapped in a simple piece of plastic tarp.

After the massive forest fires of 2020–2022, the Zone has changed drastically. The usual clearings are gone; every few meters the path turned into an obstacle course of fallen, burnt trees. We forded the Uzh River without knowing the depth, and then spent hours churning through deep swamps. The water in our boots literally squelched with foam at every step.

On the second evening, we reached some abandoned cowsheds, hoping to dry off a bit by a fire. That night, a real storm hit. The leaky roof of the hangar began to flood the fire, instantly filling the space with acrid smoke and carbon monoxide. Our hung-up clothes got soaked all over again, and we had to seek refuge in a tiny, isolated bunker-like room.

That same night, the Zone dealt another blow: Sanya suffered severe infectious food poisoning. His body rejected all food. To somehow flush his stomach, he had to drink liters of water in the pouring rain, and then continue the march carrying a heavy backpack while shivering violently.

Lethal Radiation in Hospital 126 and the Rotten Water of Pripyat

In Pripyat, a new problem awaited us — thirst. The rainwater that had collected in the city had stagnated and reeked unbearably. The water at the pumping station near the backwater was also rotten. We had to scoop standing muck straight from the Pripyat backwater and strain it through a portable filter, which constantly clogged with thick sludge. Our only salvation was the rainwater we collected directly from the leaking roofs of high-rise buildings. Paradoxically, bathing in the freezing backwater became the warmest moment of this damp trip, gifting us a fleeting sense of absolute freedom.

We explored the western radiation trace (our dosimeter showed 326+ µR/h), but our main goal was the basement of the famous Hospital 126 (MSCh-126), where the highly radioactive clothes of the first liquidators and firefighters were dumped in 1986.

The main entrance was blocked, so we squeezed inside through a narrow window opening covered in radioactive dust. The moment we brought our device close to the firefighters' rags, the dosimeter instantly maxed out at its 2500 µR/h limit, started crackling its speaker, and glitching. The real background radiation there exceeded the norm by thousands of times.

The Fatal Push to the Duga Radar and Bloody Feet

The biggest mistake of the trek was our decision to make a 15-kilometer detour to the massive Duga radar system traveling light. We dropped our backpacks and left without taking any water, food, flashlights, or power banks.

The scale of the antenna, emerging from the fog like a ghostly leviathan, gave us goosebumps. But the way back turned into a nightmare. Our phone batteries dropped below 10%, and navigation died. Trying to bypass a windfall of wet trees that were falling around us as we walked, we wandered into impenetrable, thorny thickets of acacia and raspberry bushes. We walked the final kilometers back to our camp in absolute darkness, spending 4 hours pushing through the night forest literally by touch.

On the penultimate day, we completed a total forced march of 45 kilometers. We didn't even have the strength to cook — we just collapsed on our sleeping pads by the fire and slept for three hours on the bare ground. To avoid completely destroying my wet boots before the exfil, I took them off and walked through the swamp barefoot with my heavy backpack on. Sharp sedge and stems hidden underwater cut deeply into my feet. By the end of the trek, our feet were slashed, punctured, and rubbed raw with bloody blisters.

The Chernobyl Zone is a place where money loses its power and social connections mean nothing. Here, everything is decided by your gear, your stubbornness, and your overwhelming desire to make it to the end. The Zone seems dead, but life pulses in the silence: we encountered deer, roe deer, and wild Przewalski's horses, which became our living postcards from this forgotten world.

In this silence, where nature reclaims every inch of concrete, you realize one thing clearly: some people only dream, while others act. And I am happy that I chose the latter.

If you are into raw, hardcore urban exploration and want to see what the closed Zone looks like right now, descend with me into the radioactive basement, and walk this path from beginning to end — you can watch my full 1.5-hour documentary on my YouTube channel here:

https://youtu.be/qqeox6RU0PQ?si=isrAf9jeHysEYZs9

Check out my Instagram Highlights for raw, behind-the-scenes action from my illegal treks!

https://www.instagram.com/jegords?cplk=MXJwMWdlNDdxYXh3dw==

Fount on Yupiter Factory

Exclusion Zone

Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, outside of Pripyat. Abandoned villages, agricultural facilities and equipment, dead forests, wildlife...

Video here : https://youtu.be/mIpCXnhrYmM

(not fully accurate)

Viktor Mikhailovich Degtyarenko was born on the 10th of August, 1954 in Ryazan Oblast. His family moved to Chernobyl in 1969 when Degtyarenko was 15 years old. He started his work at ChNPP on the 13th of August, 1984 as mechanical engineer first in the electrical shop, and later as an operator of the main circulation pumps in the reactor shop No. 2 of the 4th power unit.

On the night of April 26, 1986, Degtyarenko was working the night shift in the North Main Circulation Pump Hall with his colleagues, Valeriy Khodemchuk and Gennady Rusanovskiy. They were instructed to go out of the Pump Hall into the Perlite and Reagent Preperation Room, Room 419. Khodemchuk went back to fix something on the 22nd pump, while Degtyarenko and Rusanovskiy stayed back. There was a sudden surge of power after Operator Leonid Toptunov pressed the AZ-5 button. An explosion ripped through the reactor hall and collapsed the roof of the Pump Hall, killing Khodemchuk immediately. Steam Pipes ruptured, scalding Degtyarenko and Rusanovskiy. Degtyarenko ran all the way to the Control Room of the 3rd Unit where Yuvchenko found him, dazed and his face scalded.

He was evacuated and admitted to the 6th Moscow Hospital, with a radiation dose of 4-5 sieverts. He fell into a coma on the 9th of May, succumbing to his injuries on 19th of May, 1986. He was posthumously awarded the Order For Courage.

Exclusion Zone

Does anyone know?

All of this had such an irregular, sudden quality. On the one hand, it could be explained by the young age of this branch of technology, and to some extent it is; but on the other hand, it was a reflection of an overall incorrect manner of working in general. When Nikolai Ivanovich spoke his words, and they, like a light, retrospectively illuminated all the previous events, I realised that these were the right words. But I also realised that this was not specific to the nuclear energy industry, but rather the consequence of the way work was organized in general, to create, very quickly create, a new branch of technology that the national economy needs. 
Here’s a way to organize work on construction sites: inconsistency in different types of production, say, the production of fuel elements; the machine-building equipment, the unpreparedness of builders to accept this equipment on time; garbage on construction sites; constant, incomprehensible changes in the number of construction staff (by construction I mean at nuclear power plants), at times too many, at others too few. Work, so to say, is progressing on the station, then abruptly stops because one or the other equipment is not there. 
All this taken together was very unpleasant, and at the same time, hardly unique or specific to the nuclear energy industry alone. That is why the words of Nikolai Ivanovich Ryzhkov should be understood in a much wider context. And when I visited the Chernobyl station after the accident and saw what was happening there, I myself drew a precise and unequivocal conclusion, that the Chernobyl disaster is an apotheosis, the pinnacle of all the mismanagement that has been carried out for decades in our country. 
Of course, what happened at Chernobyl has real, not abstract, culprits to blame. We already know now that the reactor’s Protection Control System (PCS) had a defect in it, and many scientists knew this, and they proposed ways to fix this defect. The Chief Designer, not wanting to do, so to say, quick, additional work, was in no hurry to change the Protection Control System. 
Also, there are, of course, specific culprits. What went on at the Chernobyl station itself for many years: conducting, so to say, experiments the plans for which were made very carelessly and sloppily. Before conducting the experiments, there were no simulations of possible situations, that is the situations were not walked through—what will happen if there is a protection malfunction; what will happen if the process does not execute as planned; how should the staff react in one situation or the other; can the reactor be left running when the steam supply to the turbine is stopped; and if this is done, what could happen; what will happen if the main circulation pumps are switched on.