Chornobyl’s legacy of state disregard for human life echoes in Russia’s war in Ukraine Chornobyl was a defining rupture in the late Soviet system, revealing how bureaucratic secrecy, ideological control and propaganda converged to obscure disaster and devalue human life. This logic of state-driven denial and expendable populations persists today in Russia’s continued war in Ukraine, showing an unbroken thread of imperial ambition that comes at massive human cost.