ABSTRACT
In December 1991, both the government and parliament had issued decrees inviting engineering firms to participate in a tender to secure the reactor sleeping inside the sarcophagus. Ukraine's Chernobyl Ministry formed a steering committee and a jury for the tender under the direction of First Deputy Prime Minister Konstantin Masik. The young independent Ukrainian state had suffered a ringing blow delivered by its own national leadership. Only a few representatives of Western firms came for the governments' formal presentation of the tender. For twenty-five years, the hard earned money of Soviet and later Ukrainian taxpayers and donor nations have been flowing into the hands of wheeler-dealers in the name of nuclear security and the phantom "green meadows". The latest news is that the Ukrainian state prosecutor has opened sixty-three criminal investigations into embezzlement at Chernobyl nuclear power plant (NPP). The state has suffered damages of more than $14 million, and Chernobyl victims and liquidators have been cheated of $170 million.
