2026 RETURN TO THE ZONE

In March, I returned to Chernobyl to continue my documentation. The Exclusion Zone is now heavily militarized, marked by checkpoints, landmines, and the lingering traces of Russia’s weeks-long occupation of the Exclusion Zone and the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 2022. Three years after they withdrew, a Russian drone struck the New Safe Confinement over Reactor No. 4 in 2025, breaching its inner and outer cladding and causing extensive damage.

Yet the Zone continues to function: roughly 2,000 people rotate in shifts, sustaining a place that cannot simply be abandoned.

Amid this landscape, I encountered an unexpected form of renewal. Near the town of Chornobyl*, a small community of Old Believers is restoring the eighteenth-century Church of Our Lady of Kazan, reviving a faith their persecuted ancestors brought to the region more than 250 years ago.

I will continue to post photographs from this trip, so please follow along on my Instagram.

On Assignment…

…in front of the incomplete cooling towers for Reactors No. 5 and No. 6.