Radiation from the destroyed Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine has reportedly killed one Russian soldier after his unit camped in a toxic forest known as the Red Wood.

The soldier was part of a team that captured the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, 65 miles north of Kyiv, in the first days of the war.

They then occupied the 20-mile exclusion zone around the plant, where people are banned from living, dug trenches into radioactive mud and drove their trucks along dirt roads, kicking up radioactive dust.

Now ill and exhausted, they have retreated to Belarus.

“The Russian occupiers have left the Chernobyl nuclear power plant,” said Ukraine’s Defence Ministry. “Two key reasons: losses caused by the Ukrainian army and radiation exposure.”

While the disaster of the nuclear power plant explosion at Chernobyl in 1986 is well documented in the West and was the subject of an award-winning BBC drama in 2019, it is relatively unknown in Russia.

It is unlikely that the Russian soldiers, mainly conscripts from the poorer fringes of Russia, would have known anything about the dark history of the abandoned power plant that they had been ordered to capture. 

They did not even know that they were going to war when they were told to invade Ukraine on February 24. Their officers had told them that they were still on a military exercise and they were not issued with any nuclear protection suits.

After capturing the destroyed Chernobyl nuclear power station, the Russian soldiers were ordered to camp in the wood, known locally as the Red Wood because of the colour it turned after soaking up radiation from the nuclear explosion.

Russian commanders may not have known about the wood’s reputation as a radiation hotbed, or may not have cared.

Either way, it points yet again to poor planning and poor leadership within the Russian army.

Its reputation for competence and as an effective modern fighting force has been ripped apart over the past five weeks of war in Ukraine, in which thousands of conscripts have been killed.

The Kremlin has tried to suppress news of the Russian army’s casualties and military blunders. Many of the injured and dead soldiers from its failed assault on Kyiv are being treated in Gomel, a border town in Belarus, where doctors and nurses have previously told The Telegraph that they have been sworn to secrecy.