Projekt

A Short History of Double Displacement: The Consequences of the Chornobyl Disaster and Russia’s War against Ukraine for the Resettled Inhabitants of Vilcha

The accident at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant in 1986 forced long-term resettlement of several hundred thousand people from the contaminated areas in Ukraine. Within the unconditional resettlement zone in the Kyiv region was located a village Vilcha. Between 1993 and 1996, most of its residents moved to a newly created village with the same name in the Kharkiv region, 11 kilometers from the Russian border. As of the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Vilcha was home to approximately 1,800 people, of whom about 70 percent were internally displaced persons from the Chornobyl zone and their descendants. Vilcha survived 6 months of Russian occupation in 2022, but did not survive the new Russian offensive in the spring of 2024. As a result of the Russo-Ukrainian war the Vilcha’s population was forced to leave their homes for the second time. Today the village has turned into a ghost town, as its predecessor in the Chornobyl zone did 30 years earlier. Dr. Viktoria Naumenko aims to document the experience of twice-forcibly displaced Ukrainian citizens based on the case of Vilcha residents. Through recording oral history interviews with these twice-displaced people she seeks to analyze the impact of displacements caused by man-made disasters on the residents, their survival strategies, and the implications of forced migration in the 21st century.