Chornobyl: the continent’s most terrifying nuclear disaster turned into a disaster of corruption and
In response to the recent crisis in Ukraine, Western Europe has pledged to donate 1.5 billion Euro to aid in the reconstruction of Donbas, the industrial region of eastern Ukraine now devastated by undeclared warfare. Such grandiose promises of charity warrant a look to the lessons of the recent past, the last Ukrainian crisis – the Chornobyl tragedy. It was another attempt of the West to ease Ukraine’s suffering through spending, which instead turned the continent’s most terrifying nuclear disaster into an unseen disaster of corruption and embezzlement.
For the last 30 years, thirty-five countries have sent their Euros, Dollars, Rubles and Pounds into the Exclusion Zone, the 30 kilometer radius around the failed Chornobyl reactor marked for evacuation. Among the most generous donors were the the United States (86 mln Euro), France (47 mln Euro), Russia (45 mln Euro), Germany (42 mln Euro), the United Kingdom (32.5 mln Euro). By 2012, more than $1.18 billion had been collected from the world community overall.
The primary focus of all this global spending was a structure known as the Shelter – a concrete and steel shell to be built above the damaged reactor to contain the radiation. The most recent foreign promise to the shelter was an additional 350 million Euro from the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, which was meant to cover a growing deficit and finally finish the project.
Ukraine’s then-President Viktor Yanukovych promised the Shelter would be finished by 2015, and ex-Prime Minister Azarov gave his word of honor that each coin would be counted. But the Shelter still hasn’t been finished. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the first such disappointment. Over the past twelve years, the cost of building this nuclear sarcophagus has quadrupled: from half of a billion to 2 billion Euro. Meanwhile, Ukraine itself pledges to contribute nearly 138 million Euro by 2017. Last year it has paid out less than half of that sum.
In fact, no major Chornobyl project has ever been finished. Delays are chronic, as was the case with a widely promoted storage facility for radioactive waste. For ten years since 2002, Ukraine itself was unable to find the money needed for the project, instead it was the distant Great Britain that contributed the requisite 10 million Euro. After a large media campaign in 2012 (with one embarrassing hiccup, when the then-Head of the State Exclusion Zone Agency Volodymyr Holosha was unable to explain reason this storage facility was needed), the object at last was promised to start functioning by the middle of 2013. But the construction of nuclear waste storage facility in Chernobyl has been recently delayed until 2018. The explanation is again lack of funds. The National Commission has a claim to the excessive costs.
Volodymyr Tokarevskyy, the Head of Chornobyl Institute, a non-partisan academic research center devoted to studying the exclusion zone, considers projects in the radioactive zone largely doomed: “The construction of the liquid radioactive waste treatment plant and of the industrial complex for solid radioactive waste – these are huge international Chornobyl projects that were never finished. It’s a business, a huge business.” This business operates under safe cover, firstly, of Chornobyl itself. The exclusion zone is highly secured. Media is usually brought here only on planned trips in permitted groups for special occasions. Rarely is the press permitted to arrive of its own volition. With transparency thus excluded, officials found a rich and fertile environment for illicit income through all sorts of schemes.
Last year we went to Chornobyl without an appointment and talked with one ex-employee of the main State Enterprise “Chornobyl spetskombinat,” charged with implementing projects in the exclusion zone. Our source, on the condition of anonymity, told us the details of some corruption schemes. One big source of black income is the local lumber, which no conscious consumer wants to buy, for fear of radioactive contamination.
“They sell wood at the low-grade prices. The driver usually has two invoices: one for Chornobyl territory, where the wood is written as a local delivery for a private firm; the other document says the wood is not from Chornobyl,” says our source. We obtained documents that support his story, proving that wood supply contracts are won at one price, and sold at a second price. This year, while Ukraine was scrapping together all its financial resources to fight a war, the government was simultaneously buying exclusion-zone lumber at highly inflated prices. The state bought for 890 hyryvnia pine wood that cost the purchasers only 660 hryvnia. It paid 1000 hryvnia for oak that was bought for only 409 hryvnia. The savvy middlemen of the Chernobyl wood have offshore accounts and owners. Their authorized capital is only a few thousand hryvnia, but somehow these mysterious corporations win state tenders for millions.
We also obtained documents that show while “Chornobyl Spetskombinat” was busy ferrying illicit Chernobyl wood, it used the same strange math to purchase fuel for its work. The fuel it uses costs twice as much as the market price. Partner Oleum is the company that provides this specially priced fuel, the same company that in March 2014 won a $8 million tender from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense to supply jet fuel – which it valued at about half a million hryvnia over market price.
These are only little samples of the many ways in which “Chornobyl Spetscombinat” runs over budget. Its leader, Serhii Kushnirenko, who signed his name to all of these questionable agreements, is the brother of Azarov’s Chief of Staff. Indeed, the Chornobyl business has stayed the same despite the change in power. Nothing changed after Ukrainian ex-leaders fled from the country, officially accused of stealing some $100 billion from the budget.
Left without scrutiny from the international community that dumped millions there, the environment for corruption in Chornobyl has flourished. The unaccounted sums are large enough to close the eyes of any local supervisory body. The contaminated Chornobyl zone became so profitable that there was no need to make it safe. As international donors seek to rebuild the devastated Donbas region, let’s be sure that the incoming dollars don’t make war into another local business.
