Ideas have been floated for how the contaminated zone could bring economic benefits to Ukraine. But for the foreseeable future, it will be an army-controlled security belt.

Efrem Lukatsky, a Kyiv-based photographer for The Associated Press, was living in the city on April 26, 1986, when the explosion and fire struck the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, about a two-hour drive away.

In the early hours of 26 April 1986, Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded after a planned safety test went catastrophically wrong. The Chernobyl disaster was the result of a chain of critical errors — and its fallout was unprecedented.

Photographs from the first days of the Chernobyl disaster and of the aftermath years later show the response, the evacuation and the long-term consequences of the world’s worst nuclear accident.

AS a radiation-ravaged wilderness since Chernobyl’s nuclear reactor blew 40 years ago, I had expected the inhabitants in the toxic Exclusion Zone to have fled decades ago. But there was Hanna

Photos of the infamous nuclear Chernobyl site show the abandoned power plant frozen in time — with a control panel still lit up ahead of the 40th anniversary of the unprecedented disaster.