Top Stories — Sunday, April 26, 2026
What is trending in the USA today? Here is Breaking News:
- 40 Years After the Meltdown, War Layers Another Disaster on Chernobyl — nyt News
- 40 Years Ago, a Nuclear Catastrophe at Chernobyl — nyt News
- How Nieves González’s Painting of Lily Allen Made Her Famous — nyt News
40 Years After the Meltdown, War Layers Another Disaster on Chernobyl
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/26/2026, 9:31:26 AM
Andrew E. Kramer and
Reporting from the Chernobyl exclusion zone
Vines twirl through the broken windows of long-abandoned homes, where the detritus of lives interrupted by disaster are still scattered about: children’s shoes, dishes, coats hanging on pegs, all covered in lichen and dust.
The ghost towns of the Chernobyl exclusion zone in northern Ukraine emptied of people after the catastrophic explosion and meltdown at the nuclear power plant there 40 years ago, on April 26, 1986. High levels of radiation mean humans may never live in them again.
But these towns served another purpose for Ukrainian soldiers who recently trained amid the ruins. The troops practiced defending the irradiated land against a repeat Russian attack, taking precautions to avoid the most radioactive areas. In February 2022, Moscow’s forces entered the zone on the first day of the full-scale invasion, and occupied it for five weeks.
During the exercise, soldiers crouched beside waterlogged, mold-covered walls, aiming their rifles. Others threw live grenades into homes, chipping walls already crumbling from dry rot. Their presence highlighted a reality in the Chernobyl zone: For the foreseeable future, it will be an army-controlled security belt along the border with Belarus, a Russian ally.
“Everything depends on security” in the zone today, said the commander of the battalion training in the area, who asked to be identified by only his nickname, Skif, in keeping with military protocol.
The explosion in 1986, set off by a safety test and exacerbated by design flaws, spewed fire and radioactive material into the air, in the world’s worst nuclear disaster. Two workers were killed in the initial explosion, over two dozen emergency responders and cleanup workers died in the three months after from radiation exposure, and some 200,000 people are believed to have been relocated from the area.
Over the years, the radioactive towns, villages, forests and swamps have posed quandaries for the authorities. The land could never be repopulated, they concluded, because of contamination from long-lingering isotopes, including plutonium.
But it could bring economic benefits. Ideas included using it as a storage area for other countries’ nuclear waste, as a test site for new generations of small modular reactors, as territory for solar farms and as a destination for so-called disaster tourism.
Now, everything, other than modest solar-farm development, is on indefinite hold. Tourists, who began showing up at the site 20 years ago, are not coming back anytime soon, said Shaun Burnie, the senior nuclear specialist with Greenpeace Ukraine. Chernobyl has become one disaster layered on another: war fought in a radioactive zone.
Russia’s invasion in 2022 harmed efforts to contain radiation in multiple ways. Moscow’s forces occupied the crippled nuclear power station and used it as a staging area for attacks on Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, early in the war. Their heavy armored vehicles stirred up small amounts of radioactive dust. Weeks later, Russian troops were defeated in the battle for Kyiv, and they withdrew from Chernobyl.
More worrisome are longer-term war risks. Scientists cannot reach wells that measure groundwater radiation, lest they step on a land mine. Also owing to mines, firefighters cannot rush to extinguish wildfires that spread radiation in smoke. Foreign scientists who studied radiation in the environment have fled.
In February 2025, Russia flew an exploding Iranian-designed Shahed drone into the gigantic steel shell that encloses an older, rickety structure built over the ruined reactor shortly after the accident. That older structure, known as the sarcophagus, is at risk of collapsing and releasing radiation.
The drone explosion punched a hole in the $2.5 billion outer shell, called the New Safe Confinement, and started a fire that burned through material needed to maintain the airtight seal. No radiation was released, but the strike set back two decades of efforts to safely isolate the worst of Chernobyl’s radiation.
The attack came a day before the opening of the influential Munich Security Conference in Germany, a warning to Ukraine’s Western allies that the war could spread radiation to Europe, from Chernobyl or other nuclear sites.
It is unclear how the confinement structure can be repaired. To protect workers from radiation, it had been built away from the reactor and later moved on rails into position over it. Now, repair work will have to be done in the highly radioactive zone, possibly by cycling large numbers of workers through stints that cannot exceed 11 hours per year, to comply with safety rules.
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has estimated that repairs will cost $500 million and last four years. Foreign donors, including France and Britain, have so far pledged 70 million euros, or about $82 million, for urgent repairs. The Russian drone most likely cost no more than about $50,000.
Easier to repair was a nearby solar farm that was struck by shrapnel from the drone. The 18 damaged panels were replaced.
Two solar plants are operating in the Chernobyl zone, and a third is under construction despite the war. They sell electricity for the grid using high-voltage transmission lines originally built for the reactors, and they provide backup power for cooling ponds for nuclear waste.
Solar farms, which are unaffected by radiation and are largely impervious to missile and drone attacks because they are dispersed over large areas, still have a viable future in the exclusion zone, said Yevgen Variagin, the chief executive of Solar Chernobyl. The company opened the first solar plant there in 2018.
Otherwise, the area around Chernobyl is now primarily a military site, fortified against attacks from the north toward Kyiv and against possible Russian sabotage of the reactor or waste-storage facilities.
Tank traps, which look like X’s made from steel beams, and coils of razor wire stretch out over fields in the zone. At military positions, paths are covered in nets to protect against drones.
These defenses are typical for much of the front line in Ukraine. Other military preparations are peculiar to the radiation zone.
To fight in this landscape, the Ukrainian Army took special precautions. It did not dig trenches or burrow bunkers into the ground, lest it expose soldiers to radiation in the soil. Instead, aboveground berms or bunkers were built into hills of fresh sand that was trucked in.
Looking like large yellow anthills, these now dot the landscape around the Chernobyl plant.
Soldiers patrol the ghost towns, where buildings are covered in moss and surrounded by mature trees, lost in a swirl of dense vegetation like ancient Mayan ruins.
In the recent exercise, soldiers with the 28th Regiment of the National Guard maneuvered amid abandoned homes with corroded corrugated-metal roofs and broken windows.
Though devoid of people, the area must be defended against further damage, said Skif, the commander.
Compared with destruction inflicted elsewhere in Ukraine, an attack that released more radiation at Chernobyl, he said, would be “on a completely different scale.”
Constant Méheut contributed reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine.
Andrew E. Kramer is the Kyiv bureau chief for The Times, who has been covering the war in Ukraine since 2014.
Read the full story at nyt News.
40 Years Ago, a Nuclear Catastrophe at Chernobyl
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/26/2026, 9:31:26 AM
How Nieves González’s Painting of Lily Allen Made Her Famous
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/26/2026, 9:31:08 AM
the global profile
Nieves González, a 29-year-old painter, once worked in relative obscurity in Andalusia. Her picture of the British singer Lily Allen changed that.
Jason Horowitz spent a day with Ms. González in Granada, in southern Spain.
The shushing of brush strokes stopped as Nieves González, painting her latest Baroque-style portrait of a woman in a contemporary puffer jacket, paused to chitchat with a fellow artist in their studio in southern Spain.
“We’re always gossiping,” Ms. González, her green sweater splattered with paint and her face sparkling with nose studs, said with a laugh.
A good deal of the chatter in the Spanish art world lately, though, has been about Ms. González herself. Last year, the British singer Lily Allen plucked Ms. González, 29, out of the Instagram blue to paint her portrait for her latest album cover. The record, “West End Girl,” became a hit, and so did Ms. González, whom the newspaper Artnet called “an overnight art sensation.”
Her image of Ms. Allen, outfitted in a polka-dot puffer jacket, has been viewed millions of times on Spotify, billboards, even on Jimmy Fallon’s late-night desk. In March, the National Portrait Gallery in London unveiled the painting, which will hang in the same room as a work by David Hockney, and called her “one of the most compelling voices in figurative painting today.”
“My dream,” said Ms. González as she rapidly colored in the crimson puffer coat in her latest work.
Those puffer jackets are typical of Ms. González’s work, which feature ethereal or biblical muses sitting regally in natural landscapes that evoke work by the old masters.
She typically subverts that centuries-old aesthetic by dressing her subjects with sumptuous pink, blue and white quilted jackets — and also imbuing them with more agency and main character energy.
In June, she’ll show her work in Los Angeles, but collectors complain that the paintings are already all sold out. Ms. González’s Bilbao-based gallerist, Sergio García, described her trajectory as “vroom, vroom, vrooooom!”
For some, Ms. González’s rising star reflects her country’s renewed cultural vibrancy. For others, her use of contemporary puffy couture within a centuries-old Spanish Baroque aesthetic speaks to the negotiation of the past and present. For her friends, what Ms. González really screams is southern Spanish authenticity.
Energetic and garrulous, she claps with delight over her favorite Andalusian delicacies. As we walked through the streets of Granada, she seemed to know, and to talk to, everyone. She gabbed with friends on street corners, waved hello to the women in the flower shop, the nail salon, the record store.
“In one year, I’m the queen of the city,” she joked, adding that in reality she was always getting lost.
She sent kisses to her grandfather when he phoned her from back home, and she whispered “hashtag contemporary art” in front of touristy art galleries. At one point, she reassuringly called her boyfriend her “amor” — “love” — after he protested that she teased him too much about resembling a rotund friar featured in a calendar that she had hung in her studio. She said she wanted nothing more than to buy a country house with him outside their small mining hometown, Huelva.
“People ask me, ‘Well what is your goal, to become what?’” she said in her studio. “I think I’ve already achieved my goal, living off my art.”
She stepped back from her canvas to consult an image on an old laptop that she had received on her 18th birthday.
Instead of painting live models or photographs, Ms. González uses an A.I. system on that laptop to generate composite digital images. These amalgamations are drawn from a combination of baroque portraits, her own sketches and, in her most recent series, catwalk photographs from a fashion show that Hermès invited her to in Paris.
Those digital collages, which she calls “Frankensteins,” serve as the inspiration for her painted portraits.
While the models are imaginary, she said, she sometimes sees a trace of her own face in the finished portraits.
Not too long ago, she said, the idea of living off these portraits seemed impossible. “But here we are,” she said. “It’s like a dream I always had, but times 50.”
Ms. González was born and raised in a working-class family in Huelva. She started painting early in her childhood, she said, after her mother gave into her pleas and bought her a painting set themed around Vincent Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” series.
“I don’t know why that day she said yes,” Ms. González said.
Her favorite color became yellow, “the favorite of crazies,” she said. At 17, she enrolled in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Seville, the city of the artists Diego Velázquez and, for a time, Francisco de Zurbarán, both of whom influenced her greatly. She received a classical painting education and made extra money by selling her portraits to foreigners at a Seville art market and by painting caricatures of guests at weddings in Huelva.
After getting her master’s in art at Seville, she found herself working in a Huelva cosmetics store and wanted out. She had Italian friends and an ear for language, so she gave Italy a try, working as a nanny for “two demons” in the country’s north before escaping south to Aquila, where she was ultimately offered a job as a dentist’s assistant. “Me,” she said, “who knows nothing about teeth.”
She realized that if she could land a job in a foreign land and language doing something she didn’t know anything about, maybe she should return home and take a shot at doing what she did best. She gave herself a year to try becoming a painter.
Back in Huelva, she taught art classes as she worked on portraits. She sketched a copy of a Baroque master’s work in an hour for the inauguration of Huelva’s new museum. Galleries started showing her work. Her Instagram page, filled with her portraits, started gaining followers.
Last year, she moved across the region to Granada with her boyfriend, Agus Díaz Vázquez, also an artist. She usually ate lunch in the dank basement studio, heavy with the scent of paint, with her fellow artists, a jocular crew that enjoyed trouncing her in card games.
One day there, she received an unexpected message.
Leith Clark, the creative director for Ms. Allen’s album, had found Ms. González’s page. She forwarded the work to Ms. Allen, including one of a saintly figure in a blue puffer jacket holding a swan, asking what her boss thought.
“You know when you know,” said Seb Chew, Ms. Allen’s producer and close associate who was involved in the process. “Never seen anything like it before.”
Ms. Allen’s team reached out to Ms. González, without mentioning whom they worked for. But the painter was busy with work, didn’t understand what they wanted and ignored the message. Ms. Allen’s team then emphasized that they sought an album cover for a “very famous person.”
Ms. González soon connected with Ms. Allen on a video call, took the commission and hunkered down in the studio for weeks, painting to flamenco music. Ms. González said that Ms. Allen’s team had given her photographs to work from but otherwise relatively little instruction — trusting her to convey the sense of strength and independence that they were looking for.
Using that creative license, Ms. González outfitted Ms. Allen in a polka-dot puffer that the musician, in reality, had never worn. Once the album came out, it soon made headlines for lyrics that, the singer has said, are laced with details about her split from the American actor David Harbour.
The publicity also paid off for Ms. González.
Soon, her friends in the studio started poking fun at her resident celebrity status. They began teasing Ms. González by referring to her as Britney Spears. “Oh Britney,” one colleague said whenever Ms. González complained about all of the new demands on her time.
Ms. González did not meet the actual pop star, Ms. Allen, in person until last month at the portrait’s official unveiling in London. They hit it off, Ms. González said, but this time, she held her tongue.
“Can you imagine,” she said, her eyes widening at the possibility, “gossiping with her?”
Carlos Barragán contributed reporting.
Jason Horowitz is the Madrid bureau chief for The Times, covering Spain, Portugal and the way people live throughout Europe.
Read the full story at nyt News.
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