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What did mid-April 2020 reveal in two reports?
Summary
A look back at two reports from 14 and 15 April 2020: wildfires in the Chornobyl exclusion zone and a Russian missile test.
What was in the news around 16 April 2020? Two separate reports from the preceding days stand out, one about land and one about space.
On 14 April 2020, it was reported that the largest forest fires in the Chornobyl exclusion zone had lasted 10 days and burned 3,500 hectares of land. The scale of the damage was the main point of that report: 3,500 hectares gone over a period of more than a week.
On 15 April 2020, United States Space Command said that Russia had conducted a direct-ascent anti-satellite missile test. That was the attribution given at the time, and it came from the American military command responsible for space.
The two items have no connection to each other. One concerned an environmental emergency inside Ukraine's exclusion zone, the other a military test attributed to Russia by a US command. Together they show the range of developments that international readers were following in the region in mid-April 2020.
