40 years on, Chernobyl’s exclusion zone is now a wildlife haven

Four decades after the 1986 nuclear disaster in Ukraine, the Chernobyl exclusion zone has become one of Europe’s largest nature reserves, covering over 4,500 km². Wolves, lynx, moose, brown bears — absent for over a century — and even Przewalski’s horses now roam freely on contaminated land that is too dangerous for human life.