Amid war with Russia, Ukrainians face a nuclear threat with grit and dark humour

Dmytro Bondarenko is ready for the worst. 

He's filled the storage area under his fold-up bed and just about every other nook of his apartment in eastern Kyiv with water and non-perishable food.

There are rolls of packing tape to seal the windows from radioactive fallout.

He has a gas-fired camping stove and walkie-talkies.

There's even an AR-15 rifle and a shotgun for protection, along with boxes of ammo.Fuel canisters and spare tyres are stashed by his washing machine in case he needs to leave the city in a hurry.

"Any preparation can increase my chance to survive," he said, wearing a knife and a first-aid kit.

With the Russian invasion in its ninth month, many Ukrainians no longer ask if their country will be hit by nuclear weapons.

They are actively preparing for that once-unthinkable possibility.

Over dinner tables and in bars, people often discuss which city would be the most likely target or what type of weapon could be used.Nobody wants to believe it can happen, but it seems to be on the mind of many in Ukraine, which saw the world's worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986.

"Of course Ukraine takes this threat seriously, because we understand what kind of country we are dealing with," presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said, referring to Russia.

The Kremlin has made unsubstantiated claims that Ukraine is preparing a "dirty bomb" in Russian-occupied areas — an explosive to scatter radioactive material and sow fear.

Kyiv strenuously denied it and said such statements were more probably a sign that Moscow was itself preparing such a bomb and blaming it on Ukraine.The nuclear fears trigger painful memories from those who lived through the Chernobyl disaster, when one of four reactors exploded and burned about 100 kilometres north of Kyiv, releasing a plume of radiation.

Could Ukraine's threatened power plant still melt down?
Fighting near the plant has fuelled fears of a nuclear disaster like the one that took place at Chernobyl in 1986.

A Russian soldier in full combat gear holds a weapon as he stands between two industrial buildings near power lines.
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Soviet authorities initially kept the accident secret, and while the town near the plant was evacuated, Kyiv was not.

Svitlana Bozhko was a 26-year-old journalist in Kyiv who was seven months pregnant at the time of the accident, and she believed official statements that played it down.

But her husband, who had spoken to a physicist, convinced her to flee with him to the south-eastern Poltava region, and she realised the threat when she saw radiation monitors and officials rinsing the tyres of cars leaving Kyiv.

Those fears worried Ms Bozhko for the rest of her pregnancy, and when her daughter was born, her first question was, "How many fingers does my child have?".

That daughter, who was healthy, now has a one-year-old of her own and left Kyiv the month after Russia invaded.

Still living in Kyiv at age 62, Ms Bozhko had hoped she would never have to go through something like that again.

But all those fears returned when Russian President Vladimir Putin sent in his forces on February 24.

"It was a deja vu," she said.