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'No way out': Life under the Russians at Chernobyl

It began as a normal shift at Chernobyl for Oleksiy Shelestiy but as night turned to day on February 24, distant artillery fire and the arrival of Russian troops changed everything.

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"We were not mentally prepared for this," Shelestiy told AFP. "But we had no way out." As a night shift supervisor, Shelestiy oversaw a team of nearly a dozen people charged with monitoring electricity supplies at Chernobyl, where a massive sarcophagus covers the remains of a destroyed nuclear reactor to prevent radioactive contamination.