Twenty-nine years ago, during the early hours of April 26, 1986, the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl, located nearly 60 miles north of Kyiv, experienced what many Western experts called the worst nuclear accident in history. The initial report of the incident was released by Soviet authorities two days after the nuclear catastrophe.

The initial four-sentence announcement of an incident at the plant by TASS news service on April 28 came only after authorities in Sweden detected abnormally high levels of radioactivity. Residents of Kyiv were not told about any safety precautions that they should take, such as not eating fresh produce, not drinking the water, staying indoors, taking iodine tablets. However, in Poland, children and pregnant women were given iodine in liquid and tablet form, and told not to drink milk from grass-fed cows, or eat fresh produce.