Chernobyl zone wildfires: where matters stood on 20 April 2020
A look back at the fires in Ukraine's exclusion zone, which emergency officials had declared extinguished days earlier.
What was the state of the wildfires in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone on 20 April 2020? Six days earlier, on 14 April 2020, officials of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine had announced the successful extinguishment of all open fires in the zone.
The blazes were part of a series of wildfires that began burning inside the zone in April 2020. They were largely extinguished within two weeks, and at least one suspect was later arrested for alleged arson.
The zone, also known as the 30-Kilometre Zone or simply The Zone, was established shortly after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, when the site was part of the Ukrainian SSR in the Soviet Union. That history made any fire inside its boundaries a matter of public attention.
By 20 April 2020, then, the announcement from the State Emergency Service had already set out the official position: no open fires remained. The emergency service's declaration of 14 April marked the point at which the firefighting effort was presented as having succeeded.
