A wildfire broke out Friday inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone after two drones crashed near the site, Ukrainian authorities said, sending firefighters into a race to contain a blaze that spread across at least five square miles.
Officials said radiation levels were currently within normal limits as crews worked through the day to bring the fire under control. Vyacheslav Chaus, the regional governor, said Russian craft had been constantly hovering over the area and impeding the response.
The fire comes inside a 1,000-square-mile exclusion zone that surrounds the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster, where Reactor No. 4 exploded on April 26, 1986, and sent radioactive fallout across Europe. The area is full of dead trees and debris that can burn easily, and when flames move through it they can release radioactive materials stored in plants and animals and carry them over long distances.
That danger has loomed larger since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, when concerns about wildfires in the zone rose sharply. The Chernobyl chernobyl fire also follows a separate Russian drone strike in 2025 that damaged the protective steel dome over Reactor No. 4 for more than a year, even though radiation levels at the time appeared normal.
For now, the immediate question is not whether the site is contaminated but whether crews can get ahead of a blaze that already covers a wide stretch of ground, in a place where fire has never been just a fire.
