A member of staff at the plant from 1982, he became a witness to the immediate aftermath on the morning of 26 April 1986.

The story of the reactor’s catastrophic explosion, as told in an HBO/Sky miniseries, has received the highest ever score for a TV show on the film website IMDB. Russians and Ukrainians have watched it via the internet, and it has had a favourable rating on Russian film site Kinopoisk.

Mr Breus worked with many of the individuals portrayed and has given his verdict of the series.

Warning: This story contains plot details from the miniseries.

How much was fact and fiction?

“I was surprised they even brought us there,” Mr Breus says of arriving at work the morning after the explosion. “The reactor looked so damaged, it seemed there was nothing else to do there.”

Some of the events he witnessed that morning were realistically depicted in the show, he says, but others he describes as fiction.

“The Chernobyl catastrophe is depicted in a very powerful way, as a global catastrophe that absorbed huge numbers of people. Also, emotions and mood at that time are shown quite precisely, both among the personnel and the authorities.

What about the main characters?

The roles of three key personalities lie at the heart of the story: Plant director Viktor) Bryukhanov, chief engineer Nikolai Fomin and deputy chief engineer Anatoly Dyatlov. And Oleksiy Breus sees their portrayal as “not a fiction, but a blatant lie”.

“Their characters are distorted and misrepresented, as if they were villains. They were nothing like that.”

“Possibly, Anatoly Dyatlov became the main anti-hero in the show because that was how he was perceived by the power plant’s workers, his subordinates and top-management, in the beginning. Later this perception changed.”

All three men were sentenced to 10 years in a labour camp for their role in the disaster and series creator Craig Mazin maintains that Dyatlov in particular was a “real bully”, who later made statements that were not credible.

“The operators were afraid of him,” Mr Breus agrees. “When he was present at the block, it created tension for everyone. But no matter how strict he was, he was still a high-level professional.”

How accurate was portrayal of radiation?

Mr Breus says the series creators showed the radiation effects on the human body well.

In the hours after the explosion, he spoke to Oleksandr Akimov, the shift leader at the No. 4 reactor, and operator Leonid Toptunov, who both feature prominently in the series.

“They were not looking good, to put it mildly,” he says. “It was clear they felt sick. They were very pale. Toptunov had literally turned white.”

Within two weeks, both Mr Akimov and Mr Toptunov had died in a Moscow hospital of acute radiation syndrome (ARS).

“I saw other colleagues who worked that night. Their skin had a bright red colour. They later died in hospital in Moscow.”

“Radiation exposure, red skin, radiation burns and steam burns were what many people talked about but it was never shown like this. When I finished my shift, my skin was brown, as if I had a proper suntan all over my body. My body parts not covered by clothes – such as hands, face and neck – were red”.

In the weeks immediately after the explosion, 29 power plant workers and firefighters died from ARS, caused by exposure to high doses of ionising radiation, according to Soviet officials.

Two more workers died because of injuries. The body of one of them, Valery Khodemchuk, was never recovered from the reactor debris………https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48580177