Fools rush in ...

Reactor Number 4 in Chernobyl, now tightly sealed, exploded in 1986. Early fears of a radiation leak from a spent fuel storage site last month under Russian occupation never materialized.

Well, the Russians were warned about the dangers of Chernobyl, not only in terms of just how fragile and dangerous messing around with the facility truly was in terms of what would happen if the power was shut off  but also in hanging around too much in the radiative grounds surrounding this zone of death, issues the Russians ignored at their own peril as seen by the NYTimes piece titled Russian Blunders in Chernobyl: ‘They Came and Did Whatever They Wanted.

Tank treads ripped up the toxic soil, bulldozers carved trenches and bunkers, and soldiers spent a month camped in — and dug into — a radioactive forest.’

It gets better.

CHERNOBYL, Ukraine — As the staging ground for an assault on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, one of the most toxic places on earth, was probably not the best choice. But that did not seem to bother the Russian generals who took over the site in the early stages of the war.

“We told them not to do it, that it was dangerous, but they ignored us,” Valeriy Simyonov, the chief safety engineer for the Chernobyl nuclear site, said in an interview.

Apparently undeterred by safety concerns, the Russian forces tramped about the grounds with bulldozers and tanks, digging trenches and bunkers — and exposing themselves to potentially harmful doses of radiation lingering beneath the surface.

In a particularly ill-advised action, a Russian soldier from a chemical, biological and nuclear protection unit picked up a source of cobalt-60 at one waste storage site with his bare hands, exposing himself to so much radiation in a few seconds that it went off the scales of a Geiger counter, Mr. Simyonov said. It was not clear what happened to the man, he said.

Power was restored just in time to avert a nuclear disaster when the Russians left the scene.

An abandoned Russian checkpoint in the Exclusion Zone. The camps showed signs of Russian forces digging in soil that could contain radioactivity 1,000 times ambient levels, enough to cause cancers.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread - Marie Antoinette