“For receiving payments”: over one hundred thousand Ukrainians have registered in the Chernobyl exclusion zone since the beginning of the war

Since the start of the full-scale war in 2022, as many as 135,000 people have moved to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone to receive state payments.

This was stated by Darya Marchak, Ukraine’s Deputy Minister of Social Policy, in an interview with Forbes magazine.

According to her, people are registering as residents in the Chernobyl Zone to receive state payments for living in a radiation-contaminated area. This creates an additional burden on the budget, amounting to 5 billion hryvnias annually.

In the 2025 state budget, payments are allocated only for those who lived in the Chornobyl zone between 1986 and 1993, she added.

Previously, President Volodymyr Zelensky authorized military personnel to determine who receives payments in the event of capture or disappearance at the front.

According to the document, if a servicemember does not designate the distribution of funds, payments will be distributed in equal shares, in the following order: first to the spouse, then to the legal representatives of minor children and people with childhood disabilities, and finally to the parents.