With everything else going on — tales of the headless, hapless journalist and all that — one should not lose sight of what will in historical terms surely be the week’s biggest story, the shutdown of the last unit at Chornobyl. Of all the things that one can lay at the door of this country’s leadership, the bane of Chornobyl is not one of them. In fact, defectors recalled fifteen years ago that the plant had been constructed over the objections of the then leadership of the Communist Party of Ukraine, and our author, Liubov Kovalevska, pointed out just a couple of weeks before the infernal thing blew up just how hastily and without any thought of safety it had been constructed. It was an accident waiting to happen, and happen it did. We all know the results.
Still, Academician Borys Paton is right in pointing out that closing down the last unit of a complex that should not have been built in the first place is an act more in keeping with the outside world’s interests than with Ukraine’s. This country is, to put it brutally, so ecologically dirty that another China syndrome here really will not make that much of a difference. It will make a difference to the outside world, and the outside world has an obligation to help clean up what was done in this country when it was unfree. This is why I would like to stand on my soapbox for once and ask the outside world to lend a helping hand where it is truly deserved. You know very well that I will be the first to criticize corruption and insist on the strictest controls on any aid directed here. Nevertheless, this country has severe problems in terms of electrical power, and selling off yet more pieces of the economy to Russia’s Gazprom is no solution. Ukraine has to complete its plants in Rivne and Khmelnytsky to make up for what it has voluntarily foregone. The world has no moral choice but to help, the sooner the better. In this case, Ukraine has done its bit. It is time for the outside world to acknowledge the fact and do likewise. Anything less would simply be a crime.
