When a lorry arrived at a military checkpoint a few miles from the Chernobyl exclusion zone, which had been occupied by Russian forces months earlier, Ukrainian soldiers asked its occupants what they were doing. “We’re here to pick apples,” came the reply.
Those apples, harvested from abandoned Soviet orchards and the gardens of those still living on land affected by the nuclear meltdown of 1986, have now been made into a schnapps-like spirit called Atomik.
A British-registered business, the Chernobyl Spirit Company, teamed up with the Palinochka distillery in western Ukraine to collect the remarkable harvest despite the Russian invasion.
The profits are used to help the area in its slow but steady recovery from the disaster, with locals said to suffer more from deprivation than radiation 36 years on from the meltdown that resulted in the evacuation of tens of thousands of people, leaving many settlements like ghost towns.
The distillers collected a harvest from the area to the west of the exclusion zone, including the village of Narodychi nine miles away, in 2020 and last year. They expected that the Russian invasion would stymie their efforts this year, especially as Chernobyl was captured by Russian forces in February. Even after they withdrew a month later, the area was full of military checkpoints and the detritus of war.
“Some of the people in the area lost their [apple trees] because they had tanks standing in their fruit gardens,” said Kyrylo Korychenskyi, a geochemist at the Ukrainian Hydrometeorological Institute who specialises in monitoring radiation levels.
“To get the harvest this year was not easy,” he said. “Many things, like ruined roads, abandoned houses, burnt or destroyed orchards and the risk of finding a mine in the most unexpected place, created huge obstacles. But we decided to take a risk and try.”
The team has created 1,700 bottles of Atomik to sell at £45 for half a litre, in bottles that bear a wild boar on their label. “It is very important to produce Atomik this year because it will give us a chance to raise money to help people who live on a territory that suffered [from the] Chernobyl disaster and now because of war,” Korychenskyi said.
● How does it taste? Read our review from last year
Despite its association with a disaster that unleashed 400 times more radio-activity than the Hiroshima bomb, Atomik is safe for human consumption. The levels of radioactivity in the apples are low enough that eating one would do you no harm. The distillation process removes radioactive elements such as caesium and strontium, leaving the final beverage safe by EU standards and even by much stricter Ukrainian guidelines, according to Professor Jim Smith, an environmental scientist at the University of Portsmouth who has spent 30 years studying the effects of the Chernobyl disaster.
Vasily Gonchar, an entrepreneur working with the Atomik team, said: “After the territories were classified as contaminated, business and farmers left. Only the old people remained and then only those who had nowhere to go. The land has almost ceased to be cultivated and no one has looked after the collective farm orchards for a long time. To pick ten tonnes of apples, one has to travel to ten to 15 villages. We went on this trip . . . with great anxiety.
“The fear that a rocket would hit you or that the Russians would fire at us exceeded the fear of radiation.”
There were no street or town signs, leaving Stepan Negri, the driver, to rely on a map from 1992. The apples were taken to Lviv to be turned into concentrate and on to the distillery in southwestern Ukraine.
Gonchar added: “Everyone was suspicious and surprised at why we were going there and we were carefully checked. We were shocked. Life in these villages barely existed, more than half of the houses are empty, neglected.”
Yevgeny Feyer, the purchasing manager, said: “It was hard for them to understand that we had come from one end of Ukraine to the other to pick apples but then . . . people began to approach us, offering apples.”
One couple, Nina and Bogdan Povkh, collected apples from abandoned orchards while Valentina Zorya picked wild fruit, with proceeds helping her disabled husband Igor.
“The military warned us that if there were photos of the area and villages on the phones, we would be arrested as spies,” said Feyer . “We understood we were doing a very good job. We helped people get that small income that is difficult to find in these places. And with the hope that in 2023 we will also need more fruit, we will be able to do more good in these godforsaken villages.”
