Anastasiya Ringis is a Ukrainian journalist temporarily based in Ottawa. On April 26, 1986, the fourth reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic exploded, releasing a radioactive cloud and toxic isotopes into the sky. It took an entire week for the Politburo in Moscow to evacuate Ukrainians within a 30-kilometre range of the disaster site. People in Kyiv, just 130 kilometres away from the plant, even attended the Communist Party’s May Day rally days after the explosion, unaware of the threat. And when the Ukraine SSR’s leaders finally announced evacuation plans after days of…