For four years, Vitalina Martynovska and her colleagues had been preparing a full-scale renewal of Kyiv’s National Chornobyl Museum. The redesigned galleries featured modern, streamlined displays intended to present a renewed narrative of the reactor explosion on 26 April 1986 — the gravest nuclear disaster in history. The catastrophe hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union and remains a defining event in Ukraine’s modern identity. The updated museum was meant to highlight not only the heroic