Masha Foya marks 40 years of Chernobyl in Guardian Weekly
Weekly’s 1 May edition marked 40 years since Chernobyl, pairing the anniversary with reporting on the site’s long tail of risk. Kyiv-based illustrator Masha Foya drew the cover, while reporters Pjotr Sauer and Jonathan Watts examined the reactor site’s present condition and the landscape left after people were excluded.
Foya said, "Since childhood, the story of Chornobyl has always made me feel a strange dissonance – such a tragedy occurring on a beautiful spring day in April." Her work linked the disaster’s memory to a present tense threat: the giant containment structure around the failed reactor is in urgent need of costly repairs after a Russian drone strike.
Masha Foya and the cover
Foya, a Kyiv-based illustrator, had already produced one of Weekly’s most powerful covers on the war in March 2022, soon after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began. For the 1 May issue, her illustration placed the anniversary at the center of the edition rather than treating Chornobyl as sealed history.
That choice mattered because the cover was not only commemorative. It sat beside reporting that pulled the disaster into the present, with the damaged reactor structure now requiring expensive repairs. A date that might have prompted reflection alone instead carried a warning about a site still under strain.
Pjotr Sauer at Chornobyl
Pjotr Sauer visited the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident for a special report. His account focused on the containment structure around the failed reactor and the fears growing of a possible new catastrophe at Chernobyl after the Russian drone strike.
The immediate issue is practical rather than symbolic: the structure needs costly repairs, and the strike has sharpened concern around the site’s stability. For readers following the anniversary issue, that means Chornobyl is being discussed not only as memory, but as a live infrastructure problem.
Jonathan Watts on rewilding
Jonathan Watts took the story in a different direction, looking at the accidental rewilding that followed the exclusion of humans from the area. He weighed the benefits and drawbacks to wildlife and heard from former nuclear power opponents who have become cautious advocates as the dangers of fossil fuels have become better understood over time.
That split matters because it complicates the easy anniversary narrative. Chornobyl is still a site of danger and repair, but it is also a place where nature has changed under human absence, and where older energy politics have been revised by newer fears.
The 1 May edition leaves the reader with a clear present-day consequence: Chornobyl is not only a disaster to remember, but a place whose containment structure now needs repairs after a Russian drone strike, with fears of another catastrophe shadowing the anniversary.
