Concrete crumbling like sand, their faces burning red from the radiation. Sky News speaks to Chernobyl workers who did everything they could to prevent a second explosion forty years ago.

Across the Chernobyl exclusion zone, Przewalski’s horses — stocky, sand-colored and almost toy-like in appearance — graze in a radioactive landscape larger than Luxembourg.

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.

FORTY years on from the greatest nuclear disaster in history, a 1,000 square mile patch of land is still sealed off from the world, crawling with cockroaches and patrolled by radioactive mutant

Halyna Kharshenko went to work at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on April 26, 1986, unaware of the scale and severity of the explosion that had just occurred. The next day, she had to be rushed to a hospital unit where the staff would only approach her in full protective gear.

Wild Przewalski horses graze in a forest inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone, Ukraine, Wednesday, April 8, 2026. Chornobyl is the Ukrainian name for the city.