KIEV, December 26. /TASS/. The Ukrainian ghost town of Pripyat has been adorned with a Christmas tree for the first time since the nuclear accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

"Former residents of the town arrived for the unveiling ceremony and decorated the tree with ornaments and photos," the Ukrainian ZIK TV channel reports.

The Christmas tree was erected in the town center in front of the Energetik Palace of Culture by travel companies specializing on trips to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

This summer, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky signed an executive order on lifting a number of bans regarding travelling to the exclusion zone, particularly creating a ‘green coridor’ for tourists. He also ordered his government to take measures to unleash tourist potential for Chernobyl. According to Zelensky, his order is set to "become the beginning of transforming the exclusion zone into one of the points of growth in new Ukraine."

The Ukrainian State Agency on Exclusion Zone Management has developed aquatic routes to visit the zone by travelling down the rivers of Pripyat and Uzh, assuring that the routes are fully safe to take. According to the agency, more than 90,000 tourists visited Chernobyl in 2019.

Chernobyl disaster

The disaster at the fourth reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant occurred in the small hours of April 26, 1986. More than 200,000 square kilometers of land, first and foremost, in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, became contaminated.

Around 115,000 people were evacuated from the 30-kilometer-wide affected zone.

The subsequent clean-up operation involved more than 600,000 people, about ten percent of whom died, and 165,000 became disabled.

Thanks to the dedicated work of the disaster’s responders coming from all over the Soviet Union, a concrete structure covering the nuclear reactor No. 4 was installed - known as the Shelter Object - in November 1986.

The town of Pripyat is situated three kilometers away from the power plant. Its population was 47,000 people before the accident, while now it is a ghost town as all people were evacuated due to high levels of radiation.