For four years, Vitalina Martynovska and her team had been working on a complete transformation of Kyiv’s National Chornobyl Museum. The new sleek displays were designed to tell a fresh story about the reactor explosion of 26 April 1986 – the most serious nuclear accident in history, a factor that contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and an event that continues to shape Ukraine’s identity today. The museum was to be devoted not just to the extraordinary work of the “liquidators” who did the initial cleanup after the explosion. It was also the story “of all the people whose lives changed after the disaster”, said Martynovska, the museum’s director. It reopened to visitors on 26 April, 40 years to the day since the nuclear disaster. Then, less than a month later, on the night of 23 May, a shock wave from a Russian missile engulfed the museum’s handsome historic building, a former fire station. Five days later, a still profoundly shocked Martynovska was standing among the museum’s charred remains.…