By: Izzy Cheung, Staff Writer

Content warning: mentions of war.

Dr. Svitlana Matviyenko is an assistant professor of critical media analysis at SFU’s School of Communication. On September 28, she held a lecture and Q&A discussion on nuclear terror and “radioactive colonialism.” The event was held in conjunction with SFU departments of communication, humanities, contemporary arts, and the SFU Vancity Office of Community Engagement. 

Matviyenko’s wide range of academic specializations include “media and environment, the political economy of information, and cyberwar.” Some of her most powerful works can be found on the Institute of Network Cultures’ website, which details her experiences living in Ukraine during the Russian invasion in 2022. 

To start her presentation, Matviyenko recalled how the Kakhovka Dam was destroyed on June 5, 2023. According to The New York Times, some suspect Russia is at fault for destroying the dam and causing it to overflow. The aftermath of this was the flooding of various Ukrainian cities and towns, which Matviyenko said could make it “the worst ecological disaster [in Ukraine] since the Chornobyl catastrophe.”

The destruction of the Kakhovka Dam “has been recognized as indicative of genocidal intent,” Matviyenko clarified. She noted how the environmental damage done to the area around the dam poses a “serious threat to the health and wellbeing of the Ukrainian nation and its future generations.” She described the attack as “ecocide,” which is defined as “the mass damage and destruction of the natural living world.”  

In December 2022, she visited the Ukrainian National Chornobyl Museum in Kyiv. The museum displayed photos and images of the recent Russian occupation of Ukrainian nuclear infrastructure. She described the exhibit as like being “from a crime movie” with photographs stuck to a board and tied together with red threads. 

“Let us take radiation itself as a medium, linking the present and the past,” Matviyenko said. 

She offered further context into her lecture by discussing the events of the Chornobyl disaster, which happened on April 26, 1986. The explosions carried radiation equivalent to “500 Hiroshima bombs.” The radiation was shown to have been travelling through the air 10 days later. 

Despite this event, Matviyenko argued that the full realization of nuclear power stations as a technological indicator of modern power didn’t occur after the Chornobyl disaster in 1968, as many scholars have claimed. Rather, this realization occurred in 2022, after the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam, which supplies Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. 

“[Being] immersed in the situation, I realized that everyone there, in Ukraine, does not have an option to ‘sign off,’” she recalled. “[They] don’t have an option not to see [the war].”  

A recorded version of this event will be available on SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement’s website at www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement.html.