A meeting with participants of the accident clean-up after the HBO series Chernobyl.

In the spring of 2019 the whole world watched the miniseries Chernobyl. We hung a big screen in the Hub courtyard and invited the people the series is about.

Among the guests were people played by actors. Oleksii Breus, an operator of Unit 4. Serhii Parashyn, in 1986 the party committee secretary of the plant and later its director. Oleksii Ananenko, one of the three engineers who went down the flooded corridors under the reactor; for years he was reported to have died after that descent. Next to them were Sergii Mirnyi, commander of a radiation reconnaissance platoon in 1986, the director of the National Museum "Chornobyl" Nataliia Korolevska, DJ Vlad Fisun, guides, students and journalists.

They talked about what in the series was true and what was invented. The verdict was unanimous: it is a drama, not a documentary. The names are real, but people are credited with actions they never took. Yet the state of people in those days - fear, confusion, the feeling that something had to be done - is conveyed very accurately.

Ukrainska Pravda, Hromadske, TSN and the Kyiv Post wrote about the meeting. Next to the fictional version of events, the voices of the people who lived through them were heard in the world press. The mayor of Slavutych later thanked the Hub for these open discussions and for preserving the historical truth.