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Pre-planning a Chernobyl Tour, Part #2: Catastrophic Failure



With the advent of war, and the temporary Russian occupation of the Chernobyl site at the beginning of the war, the 30 kilometre exclusion zone around the destroyed reactor has effectively become the province of the SBU, Ukraine’s State Security Service, who strictly control visits in and out of it. They require any foreigner to have military accreditation as a journalist, and then they require the journalists visiting the site to have a dossier of documents compiled including car registration details, sites to see in the exclusion zone, the serial numbers of Geiger Counters (dosimeters, as they are sometimes called), the serial numbers of cameras and camera lenses, and all sorts of other ludicrous things. All these items get examined on the way in and the way out of the exclusion zone, and by all accounts they examine every photograph and piece of video footage taken. So the process of working with the Ministry of the Exclusion Zone is a most onerous one, and there are very few tourists in town anyway so why bother. Moreover all the private tour agencies that used to exist in Kyiv to provide Chernobyl tours have closed down due to lack of custom. Therefore the number of visitors to the site is very few.


Still an intrepid team and I decided to attempt the paperwork and visit Chernobyl. We started by applying for military accreditation as journalists, which is a relatively straightforward if rather slow and cumbersome process as long as you know how to do it - and it is free. That branch of the military and the SBU are free of corruption and do their jobs (slowly), without asking you for money. So we obtained the permits in the end, and we sent them to the Ministry of the Exclusion Zone who appeared unusually helpful. It eventually became transparent why.


One of the conditions the Ministry of the Exclusion Zone imposes upon you is that you have a guide, who is not an employee of the Ministry or a member of the SBU or military, but just a private person - presumably a friend of someone who works there. There is an official fee to pay - about 750 Gryvnias (about US$18) per day - plus you must pay for the guide, who costs about 4000 Gryvnias per day (about US$100). We agreed to all these prices, even though the daily fee for the guide is quite high by Ukrainian standards. The problem came in paying these sums.


Right from the beginning, the Ministry of the Exclusion Zone insisted that we would receive a “legitimate receipt” for our fees, implying that everything would be above board. However this turned out not to be so. We received an invoice from the Ministry that was actually a payment order for Privatbank, one of Ukraine’s principal banks. That struck me as unusual, as all government fees and invoices need to be paid at a different state-owned bank. Moreover the invoice incorporated both the government fees and the private guide’s fees into a single document and a single fee, despite our having been expressly told that the guide would be independent and private.


But the more unusual thing about the invoice was that every Ukrainian bank account is identified by a sixteen-digit account number, and is also connected to a mobile telephone number: something distinctive to Ukraine because the usual international banking standards of IBAN and SWIFT numbers (IBAN being the international standard for a banking number and SWIFT being the routing code for the bank in question) don’t really work in Ukraine. Nobody has these numbers or if they do, they don’y know what they are and banking transactions aren’t really done this way. Nevertheless this invoice, which incorporated both Ministry fees and the fees of the private guide into one document, did indeed have an IBAN number (but, curiously, no SWIFT number).


Because the members of our team were travelling to Kyiv the day before the travel was due, getting this invoice paid in time (we were due to leave the next day before any banks were open) was rather difficult. One member of the team was in Kyiv and went into a branch of Privatbank to try to pay it. Firstly she was told that the computers were broken (rather a serious problem for a bank full of people doing transactions) and then she was told that she could not pay the invoice because she was not a resident of Ukraine. This was rot: of course anyone can pay invoices in banks without being a resident (for example, the fees for residence permits; I have done it myself) so we knew something was afoot. In all likelihood the bank realised that the invoice was malformed in some fashion and the staff were making an excuse not to accept the money.


We informed the Ministry of the Exclusion Zone about this problem (this was all done over WhatsApp). They told us to pay the invoice online. Without a sixteen-digit account number, electronic banking payment from one Ukrainian bank to another is difficult but can be made by reference to the telephone number on the invoice. So one of our party, travelling on a bus a long distance to Kyiv, made the payment and after some faffing around, the Ministry of the Exclusion Zone, who had asked for an official sort of receipt, received one from us confirming the payment. They were happy with that and we were all set for an early morning start, with our biohazard suits, our Geiger counters and everything else.


Then, at 9pm, the Ministry of the Exclusion Zone wrote to us that the payment was wrong and had been made to the former accountant of the Ministry - a private person - and we should recall that and instead make an international wire to the IBAN number on the invoice (which was impossible because we didn’t have a SWIFT code or a recipient name for the IBAN number). Presumably the SBU, to whom all these documents have to be submitted, had spotted that something was wrong and had rejected the paperwork. It is impossible to recall such a payment without raising a fraud alert with one’s own bank, which in Ukraine could prove extremely slow or even impossible. So essentially we were being asked to pay double, or twice.


At this point it was 9.30pm with my due to leave my hotel at 7.45am the next day, to start the drive from Kyiv up to the exclusion zone at 8.30am. So we decided to jack it all in. We had been ripped off, and someone is sitting on our money and we never got a tour.


My surmise is that this was a ham-fisted attempt to divert funds from public coffers to private sources, including a mandatory guide who probably wasn’t mandatory at all. Why government fees would appear on the same invoice as those of a private guide seems an insuperable question. So we all just went to bed, thoroughly furious, and put it down to yet another ill-executed Ukrainian rip-off.


There are two conclusions to draw from this adventure, apart from all our wasted costs on hotel accommodation and travel to Kyiv. The first is that travel to the Chernobyl exclusion zone during wartime, even as an accredited military journalist (which we all now are), is essentially impossible unless you are prepared to be thoroughly ripped off by government officials lining their own pockets. The second is that this is just another instance of endemic corruption in Ukraine, which persists even throughout the war, and the enormous steps that Ukraine will need to take to pursue Euro-Atlantic integration and raise its institutional quality to EU standards.


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Post scriptum: Shortly after this article went to press, the Ministry contacted us and offered a full refund of the fees. We shall see whether those fees are in fact received.

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