40 years on: Chornobyl’s legacy and European environmental security

Serhii Plokhii (Plokhy) is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University. A leading authority on Ukraine, Russia, and Eastern Europe, he served as the director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute from 2013 to 2025. His books won numerous awards, including the Lionel Gelber Prize for the best English-language book on the international relations for The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (2014), Taras Shevchenko National Prize (Ukraine) for The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (2015), and Ballie Gifford Prize and Pushkin House Book Prize, UK for Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy, (2018), and Duke d’Arenberg Prize in European History for The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History (2023). His latest book, The Nuclear Age: An Epic Race for Arms. Power and Survival was released by W.W. Norton in US and Penguin in UK in October 2025.

Eglė Rindzevičiūtė is Professor in Criminology and Sociology at Kingston University London, Visiting Research Fellow at the Post-Authoritarian Landscapes Research Centre, Vilnius University, and Senior Research Fellow at the Lithuanian Institute of History. She is the author of The Will to Predict: Orchestrating the Future Through Science (2023) and The Power of Systems: How Policy Sciences Opened Up the Cold War World (2016), both with Cornell University Press, and co-editor of The Struggle for the Long-Term in Transnational Science and Politics: Forging the Future (2015). Prof Rindzevičiūtė has published widely on Soviet and post-Soviet cultural policy and museums in the Baltic sea region, focusing on the processes of nation-building and de-Sovietisation. She combines Science and Technology Studies with historical sociology and intellectual history. In the recent years Rindzevičiūtė has developed a novel research agenda into nuclear cultural heritage. Her research has been funded by the EU JPI-CH, the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Baltic Sea Foundation in Sweden and the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences.

Jonathon Turnbull is a more-than-human geographer from Newcastle upon Tyne with a broad interest in nature and ecology. He is an Assistant Professor of Human Geography at Durham University and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow. Based on his PhD research, he is currently writing a book about the return of nature to the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine and has made a short documentary film—The Dogs That Survived / Собаки Що Вижили—about human-dog companionships at Chornobyl following its deoccupation. Jonny co-founded the Ukrainian Environmental Humanities Network, which explores decolonial approaches to Ukraine’s environmental issues. He lives between Newcastle in the UK and Vinnytsia in Ukraine.

Dr Sasha Dovzhyk is the editor of London Ukrainian Review. She holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Birkbeck, has taught at Birkbeck and UCL SSEES, and edited three books. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Guardian, New Lines, Index of Censorship, CNN and others. Having lived in London for nine years, she has recently moved back to Ukraine to work on institutional development.