“At least nobody is shooting here, and I can freely speak the Ukrainian language,” Doctor Oleksandr Sklyarov tells the Kiev Post. Thirty years later, the radioactive outskirts of Chernobyl are seeing a small increase in population as Ukrainians flee Russian invasion and seek cheap rents and natural beauty. The Post visited the village of Bazar, Ukraine as part of its coverage of the thirtieth anniversary of the world’s worst nuclear disaster, a product of Soviet arrogance – the plant’s deputy chief engineer, upon seeing the reactor begin to overheat, ordered staff to increase power levels rather than let it cool down – and disregard for the lives of those living in the affected zone (it took 36 hours for Soviet authorities to decide to make people evacuate due to a “minor accident“). At least one eyewitness, the author Svetlana Alexievich, recalls Soviet troops “running around” the area shouting “What do I shoot?” in response to the disaster. “You can’t shoot physics, or at radiation,” she notes. Bazar is a rarity in the Chernobyl area: a village whose population appears to be growing. Mayor Oleksandr Budko tells the newspaper that Bazar’s population has doubled over the past decade, largely due to the cheap rents and beauty of the