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With the contaminated regions poor and of little influence, there was little appetite to reopen the issue, Kadun said.

“Few people are talking about this because nobody wants to hear it,” she said.

In the villages of ginger-bread cottages strung along the plain just outside the Zone, where storks build their nests on pylon-tops and people work tiny plots of land by hand, many assume they are poisoned but say they have little way to prove it. Too poor to buy food, most grow their own and forage from ground they know is contaminated.

“What we have, we use,” said Anna Pogorelova, who lives with her two children in what was called the \"Fourth Zone\" -- an area once considered contaminated but not enough for evacuation.

\"PHOTO:
Mark J. Porubcansky/AP Photo
PHOTO: Reactor No. 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant stands encased in lead and concrete following the accident in April 1986, that released a cloud of radiation that circled the world in Pripyat, Ukraine, July 1988.
>

In many places here, Ukraine’s government pays people compensation for Chernobyl—known by Ukrainians as “coffin money”. But with the country on the edge of default, the government has been curtailing the payments for some and reclassifying areas previously deemed contaminated.

Officials have said they are making tough choices with limited resources, but those affected by the accident say the government is trying to ignore legitimate cases.

\"PHOTO:
Mikhail Metzel/AP Photo
PHOTO: The police guard on their duty the entrance of Pripyat town four kilometers from the Chernobyl power station, March 6, 1989, three years after the nuclear disaster.
>

“We have the impression that they would rather that we had just gone already,” said Nadezhda Makarevich. Makarevich was evacuated from Pripyat, the town closest to the reactor. On the morning after the explosion, she was washing her windows. Not alerted by the Soviet authorities, she inhaled fallout, suffering radioactive burns on her lungs.

Makarevich is part of a group campaigning for the government to pay support benefits to those poisoned by the accident, as it is obliged by law.

With so many once classified as victims of Chernobyl -- the number of so-called “liquidators,” workers who contained the accident, is around 500,000 -- and the illnesses so long-term, those claiming Chernobyl benefits are often stigmatized as scroungers.

In the villages around the Zone, many say they’re resigned to living on contaminated ground. In any case, they say, radiation is only one of their problems.

“We’re not a big region,” Pogorelova said. “No one pays us any attention.”

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