Nathan Russer on Twitter:
Putin's War - The Daily Brief - March 31
5 weeks ago, Russia invaded Ukraine. After some initial gains, their progress rapidly slowed. Now, every day for the past week, Ukraine has retaken more territory than it's lost.
See this thread for a series of maps and downloadable data.
(maps attached to that tweet and subsequent tweets)
As for the Chernobyl: My impression is that the area is not nearly radioactive enough to cause acute radiation sickness, at least not outside a few locations inside the containment structure. During the worst of the meltdown and cleanup, only something like 140 people got enough exposure to show symptoms, and most of them survived.
That said, the Russian soldiers seem to have been digging trenches in the area (including the red forest) and were probably also burning firewood from the area, eating meat from game they might have shot in the area, or fish caught in the waters. That's going to result in ingestion of enough material to pretty much guarantee cancer down the road.
There are reports that many of the soldiers sent to Chernobyl had not heard of it, not heard what had happened there. Full state control of the press can make that happen, especially if you're talking about 18-19 year old kids from small rural towns in the east.
And, back in the day, even as the USSR was fumbling along and avoiding any international discussion of the event, the scientists in the area were having
some impact on how the emergency response and containment was handled. (even if it were far below western safety standards). So they wore respirators, showered soon after potential exposure, rotated staff to reduce time spent in the zone, all that.
This time around, it seems as if the Russian military viewed the staff on the site as if they were the enemy, or were naïve children to be ignored. No respirators, nothing. So there might be hundreds or even thousands of young Russian men who breathed in radioactive particles in dust or smoke, or consumed radioactive particles in water or meat or fish. These poor guys are pretty well doomed to get cancer in a decade or two or three or five.
ETA:
Started a thread on the subject in the Science Forum