Natalia Khodymchuk, a 73-year-old resident of Kyiv and the widow of Valeriy Khodymchuk, who was killed in the explosion of the fourth reactor at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant on April 26, 1986, died in hospital after a Russian attack on the Ukrainian capital on the night of November 14, 2025. According to city officials, she suffered burns to 45% of her body and burns to her airways.
Her death was announced the following day by Tymur Tkachenko, head of the Kyiv City Military Administration. Journalists later established that the victim was Natalia Khodymchuk. Her apartment on the seventh floor in Troieshchyna burned out completely, while the building itself, home since the late 1980s to evacuees from the Chornobyl zone, was damaged from the sixth to the eighth floor.
A family bound to Chornobyl
Valeriy Khodymchuk worked as a senior operator of the main circulation pump in the reactor unit and stayed at his post during the disaster until the end. His remains were never found. He was later remembered as Chornobyl’s first victim and was posthumously awarded the Badge of Honor, and after Ukraine gained independence, the Order for Courage, 3rd class.
After the catastrophe, Natalia evacuated from the exclusion zone with her son and daughter and received an apartment in Kyiv’s Troieshchyna district. The building was long known as the “Chornobyl house” or the “station house,” because plant workers and their families were resettled there.
“I never washed it. Valeriy’s scent stayed on the shirt for a long time,” Natalia recalled about the garment she placed in his symbolic grave at Moscow’s Mitino cemetery in 1996.
According to Ukraine’s State Agency for Exclusion Zone Management, Natalia Khodymchuk had been expected on November 25 for the photo project “Chornobyl: A Woman’s Fate,” prepared for the 40th anniversary of the disaster. On the eve of her death, friends from the veterans’ group Promin 5-2 visited her in the burn unit; those present said she remained conscious and spoke mainly about her husband.
After the start of the full-scale war, Natalia could no longer travel either to Russia’s Mitino cemetery or to the exclusion zone once it was occupied. In 2022, she became a grandmother; the baby girl was named Valeria in honor of her grandfather.