What the Chornobyl zone fires revealed by 17 April 2020
A look back at the wildfires in the exclusion zone, which officials declared extinguished days before 17 April 2020, alongside the budget changes passed in parallel.
What did Ukraine's institutions have to show for the first half of April 2020? By 17 April 2020, the country had weathered a ten-day emergency in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, and its parliament had already reshaped the state budget for the coronavirus crisis.
On 11 April, a village near the mostly abandoned town of Poliske was evacuated as forest fires continued to spread inside the zone. On 13 April, the flames reached the abandoned city of Pripyat, 2 km (1.2 mi) from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.
On 14 April, officials of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine announced that all open fires in the zone had been extinguished. As reported at the time, the blaze, the largest in the zone's history of such fires, lasted ten days and burned 3,500 hectares of land.
Later accounts added that the fires were largely extinguished within two weeks of starting in April 2020, and that at least one suspect was arrested for alleged arson.
A budget rewritten for a pandemic
The same week, on 13 April, the Verkhovna Rada adopted amendments to the 2020 state budget needed to fight COVID-19. The changes tripled the budget deficit.
Taken together, the two stories showed the state handling a physical emergency and a fiscal one at once: an emergency service bringing a long-running fire under control, and lawmakers committing to far greater borrowing needs to meet the pandemic.
A wider backdrop
On 15 April, according to United States Space Command, Russia conducted a direct-ascent anti-satellite missile test.
