Borys Baranov

Boris Aleksandrovich Baranov (; ; 11 November 1940 — 6 April 2005) was an engineer at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and a Chernobyl liquidator. As a liquidator, he and two others volunteered to drain the steam suppression pools under the fourth reactor building, thus preventing the reactor from exploding.

Baranov lived almost 20 years after the Chernobyl disaster, dying due to a heart attack in Kyiv, Ukraine, on 6 April 2005, aged 64. In 2019, he was posthumously awarded the title Hero of Ukraine.

Career Boris Aleksandrovich Baranov was born on November 11, 1940, in Sozinovy, Kirov Oblast, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union. Baranov had a brother five years older than him named Viktor. Their father died during World War II.

After completing his military service in the Soviet Army, Baranov moved to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Also in 1976, Baranov's wife died and he was left to raise his six-year-old daughter and one-year-old son alone. However, this fear was unfounded since corium had already began dripping into the bubbler pools, turning into a ceramic pumice that floated on the water's surface. Government officials were unaware of this, and thus decided to drain the bubbler pools by opening its sluice gates. The sluice gates were controlled by valves located in a flooded subterranean annex adjacent to the Reactor 4 building. The path to them had been made passable, with water up at knee-level in some parts, by the efforts of firefighters who had used specialized water hoses.

The team responsible for carrying this out was composed of Oleksiy Ananenko and Valeri Bezpalov (engineers who had knowledge of where the valves were), and Boris Baranov. Unofficially called the 'suicide squad', all three men were volunteers. of water was then pumped out using fire brigade pumps until it was gone by May 8.

In media

Baranov was portrayed by Oscar Giese in the Sky/HBO miniseries Chernobyl (2019).

The 2020 game Liquidators puts players into the perspective of Baranov as he, Ananenko, and Bespalov work to drain the steam suppression pools under Reactor 4.