On the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, troops seized the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and held its Ukrainian staff under occupation for thirty-five days.

Serhii Plokhy reconstructs this period through the workers forced to keep the site functioning, Russian officers with little understanding of nuclear infrastructure, and people caught inside an exclusion zone that had suddenly become a military corridor to Kyiv.

Plokhy treats the occupation not merely as an episode of war but as a demonstration of what happens when nuclear systems are placed inside political chaos. The book’s tension comes from a mundane form of courage: exhausted workers maintaining procedures, negotiating with armed men and preventing reckless decisions from becoming another catastrophe. Closely reported without losing sight of the larger history of Chernobyl, it is both a wartime narrative and an argument about the dangerous dependence of complex infrastructure on human judgment. For readers of contemporary history, Ukraine, nuclear politics and institutional failure.

Penguin Press, 2025 paperback edition.