In the wisdom of the Ashanti people, which Ghana has shared with the world through its Adinkra symbols, there is one thought humanity can hardly live without: “se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi” — “it is not wrong to go back for what you have forgotten.” Sankofa is not nostalgia for the past. It is a living and mature idea: if we do not wish to repeat mistakes, we must have the courage to look back honestly, without embellishment.
Today, I address the Ghanaian reader in precisely that spirit. On 26 April 2026, the world marks the fortieth anniversary of the disaster at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine — the largest man-made catastrophe in human history. And Ukrainians, returning to what we remember, are ready to share a very concrete lesson with the brotherly people of Ghana.
It is not only a lesson about nuclear safety. It is a lesson about the price nations pay when an empire, believing itself untouchable, chooses to trade its truth for the sake of preserving its own calm image.
What Happened That Night
At 1:23 a.m. on 26 April 1986, in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, a technological experiment began at Reactor No. 4 of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant. It was conducted on Moscow’s instructions and in direct violation of nuclear safety rules.
Two minutes later, two explosions were heard within seconds of each other. The reactor was completely destroyed. Even today, the figures of that catastrophe can take one’s breath away — even for those familiar with the history of nuclear energy.
The total activity of radioactive isotopes released into the atmosphere was thirty times greater than that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Inside the destroyed reactor, radiation levels reached twenty thousand roentgens, while five hundred roentgens over five hours is considered lethal for a human being.
Around 8.5 million people received significant radiation exposure. More than 300,000 were forced to leave their homes forever. Nearly 600,000 consequences: firefighters, soldiers, miners, medics, and engineers became the liquidators of the disaster consequences; many paid with their health, and some with their lives.
Some 145,000 square kilometres of land in present-day Ukraine, Belarus, and the Russian Federation were contaminated. The exclusion zone around the plant, where people are forbidden to return, is roughly the size of the Greater Accra Region. In the ten-kilometre radius around the reactor, safe life may not be possible for another twenty thousand years. This is not a metaphor — it is the half-life of isotopes that still remain in the soil.
But the Main Explosion Was Not the Reactor
The main explosion of 1986 — and this is the lesson Ukraine asks Ghana not to forget — was the lie. For two days after the blast, the world knew nothing at all.
The first warning came not from the Soviet Union, but from a Danish nuclear laboratory, which on the evening of 27 April detected a maximum-category accident at an unidentified Soviet reactor. Swedish sensors also registered a sharp rise in radiation, and on 28 April the Swedish government publicly demanded explanations from Moscow.
Only later that same day, at nine in the evening, Soviet central television gave the world four short sentences: “An accident has occurred at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant. One reactor has been damaged. Measures are being taken. A government commission has been established.”
No mention of the scale of the release. No advice for mothers or doctors. No names or even the number of the dead.
On 1 May 1986, the wind turned toward Kyiv — the capital of Ukraine — and radiation levels in the city rose sharply. That same morning, Soviet authorities brought hundreds of thousands of people, including schoolchildren carrying flowers, onto Kyiv’s main square for the traditional May Day parade. Moscow refused to cancel the parade.
People marched through invisible radiation so Soviet propaganda could tell the world that nothing serious had happened.
On 11 May 1986, the Ministry of Health of the Ukrainian SSR, acting on instructions from the union centre, issued a secret order instructing doctors in the Kyiv region to diagnose patients showing clear symptoms of radiation sickness with “vegetovascular dystonia.”
On 30 June 1986, the KGB (Soviet security service) introduced a classified list of information about the Chornobyl disaster that citizens were not allowed to know: the true causes of the accident, the scale of destruction, real radiation conditions, and exposure doses of staff and civilians.
Documents on actual contamination remained secret until 1989. The first public statement by the head of state came only on 14 May — eighteen days after the explosion — when Soviet leader Mikhail Horbachov addressed the nation. Most strikingly, it was not an apology. It was an accusation against the West.
Allow me to quote: “We were confronted with a veritable accumulation of lies — shameless and malicious… Their organisers were interested neither in truthful information about the accident nor in the fate of the people of Chornobyl…” Forty years later, the same formula — “we are victims of Western lies, not their source” — can still be heard in the press conferences of modern Russia’s foreign ministry.
This is no coincidence. It is ideological continuity with the same regime that taught the world to fear Soviet reactors and now teaches it to fear Russian missiles.
A Language Understood Between Pripyat and Volta
Dear Ghanaian readers, I would not dare take your time with lists of figures and quotations if I were not convinced that your nation understands this faster than many others. Ghana was the first country in Sub-Saharan Africa to usher in the era of independence on 6 March 1957.
When your first president, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, said the famous words, “We face neither East nor West; we face forward,” he was speaking not only about Ghana. He was speaking for all peoples who refuse to be provinces of foreign empires.
Thirty-four years later, Ukraine joined that great family of independent states. That is why today, as we defend our territory from full-scale Russian aggression, we feel a deep affiliation with every African people that knows the value of sovereignty.
I know Ghana takes pride — and rightly so — in being a stable multi-party democracy with a tradition of peaceful transfers of power. The inauguration of H.E. John Dramani Mahama at the beginning of last year was another example of that mature political culture for which Ghana is respected far beyond Africa.
Ukraine, on its own more difficult path, defends the same value: the right of a people to decide for themselves who governs them and what their future will be.
Those who try to choose it for us instead — whether in 1932 with famine, in 1986 with silence about the reactor, or today with missiles — ultimately receive a clear verdict from history.
Chornobyl Is Not in the Past
That is why the greatest pain of these days is this: for us, Chornobyl is not an anniversary. It is news. On 24 February 2022, when the Russian Federation launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian troops entering from Belarus made the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone one of their first priorities.
They took the plant’s personnel hostage, while the staff continued working around the clock under occupation to prevent another catastrophe. Russian soldiers dug trenches in the so-called Red Forest — one of the most radioactively contaminated places on Earth — and suffered mass exposure, something their own commanders had not even warned them about.
On 31 March 2022, the Armed Forces of Ukraine drove the occupiers out of the plant area. Retreating Russian forces took 169 Ukrainian National Guardsmen who had guarded the station, first to Belarus and then to Russia. Not all of them have returned home.
Damage caused to the Chornobyl exclusion zone during the occupation alone has been estimated at over €100 million. And there is also the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant — Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, occupied by Russian forces since March 2022.
For the first time in history, an operating nuclear plant fell into the hands of an aggressor state, and by its very nature, a terrorist one. Mining the perimeter, shelling from the station grounds, abducting Ukrainian workers, replacing licensed specialists with unqualified Russian personnel — these are realities of our time.
Why This Matters to Ghana
I understand that from Accra to Pripyat there are thousands of kilometres. But in the twenty-first century, borders mean nothing to a radioactive cloud, a missile, or hunger.
There are three reasons why Chornobyl-40 is also a Ghanaian conversation.
First: Food Security
For decades, Ukraine has been one of the world’s largest suppliers of wheat, maize, and sunflower oil, including to West African markets. Russia’s blockade of our Black Sea ports in 2022 led to a surge in global bread prices, which Ghana also felt.
The same hand that kept Ukrainians in ignorance in 1986 tried to keep Africans in hunger in 2022. This chain can be broken only through joint efforts.
Second: Global Nuclear Safety
Ghana is a country that strategically considers peaceful nuclear energy as part of its future energy mix. This is a wise and forward-looking ambition. But for any country to realise it safely — and Ghana especially — the world needs a strong global nuclear safety architecture: an effective IAEA, firm conventions, and clear rules for all.
When a permanent member of the UN Security Council openly turns another country’s nuclear plant into a military object, it is not merely waging war on Ukraine. It is undermining trust in the very institution of the peaceful atom, making the path harder for countries like Ghana.
Third: Justice and Memory
On 10 December 2025, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution initiated by Ukraine to strengthen international cooperation in studying, mitigating, and minimising the consequences of the Chornobyl disaster.
It was supported by 97 member states. Among other things, the document officially enshrined the Ukrainian transliteration Chornobyl instead of the Soviet-Russian Chornobyl. This is not a small matter. It is legal recognition that Chornobyl is a tragedy of the Ukrainian people, not merely a “Soviet incident.”
Ukraine is grateful to all African states that consistently support our sovereignty and territorial integrity at the UN, including the Republic of Ghana, whose principled and mature voice we hear and deeply appreciate.
On 26 April 2026, an international donor conference will take place in Kyiv on the restoration of the New Safe Confinement at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant — under the chairmanship of France, with the active participation of the Group of Seven countries and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
We welcome every voice of solidarity, and it is especially meaningful to us to hear such voices from our partners on the African continent.
What I Ask of Our Ghanaian Friends
I ask you to remember. Because your own calendar contains days your people have not forgotten, despite every effort by others to erase them. I ask you to speak.
Because the voice of a Ghanaian editor, parliamentarian, religious leader, scholar, or university rector — joined to the wider chorus of free nations — is stronger than any propaganda press conference. I ask you to demand.
Demand the liberation of all Ukrainian nuclear sites from foreign occupation. Demand accountability for those who use nuclear weapons and nuclear infrastructure as tools of blackmail. Demand that the phrase “never again,” which we have repeated since 1986, remain a real promise rather than an empty one.
Forty years ago, Soviet Moscow taught its people that Chornobyl was something best left unspoken. Today, the successor of that same regime teaches the world that the new Chernobyls it prepares should also be met with silence.
Ukrainians are no longer silent — and among those who, we know, hear us attentively is the people of the Republic of Ghana. Returning today for our truth, as Sankofa teaches us, we Ukrainians offer that truth also to all our friends.
May God protect the peoples of Ghana and Ukraine. May our lands — the shores of the Volta River and the banks of the Dnipro River — never know either a radioactive cloud or imperial lies.
And to the words of the great Nkrumah — “We face neither East nor West; we face forward” — we would add the Ukrainian reply: We too are looking forward. And we are grateful to all who look forward with us.
Ayekoo. Glory to Ukraine!
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The writer, Ivan Lukachuk, is the Charge d’affaires of Ukraine in Ghana
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