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Ukraine

3 stories set here.

The Cabinet June 27, 2026 · Balaclava, Crimea

The Misunderstood Order That Sent 660 British Light Cavalrymen Into the Wrong Valley at Balaclava on 25 October 1854 and Killed 110 of Them

At the Battle of Balaclava on 25 October 1854 the British Light Brigade — 660 cavalrymen — charged directly at a Russian artillery battery 1.5 miles down a valley. The order had been miscommunicated. 110 men were killed, 161 wounded, and 375 horses lost in approximately twenty minutes. Tennyson's poem appeared in print six weeks later. The French general Bosquet's verdict was "C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre."

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The Coroner’s Report June 27, 2026 · Chernobyl, Ukraine

The 26 April 1986 Reactor 4 Explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant That Released About 400 Times the Radiation of the Hiroshima Bomb

The RBMK-1000 reactor at Chernobyl Reactor Block 4 exploded at 1:23:40 a.m. on 26 April 1986 during a poorly-managed safety test. The reactor lid blew off. Graphite moderator caught fire. The 10-day fire released approximately 400 times more radioactive material than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Approximately 350,000 people were eventually evacuated permanently from the 30-km exclusion zone.

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The Footnote June 24, 2026 · Caffa (Feodosia), Crimea

The Mongol Catapult That Threw Plague Corpses Into the Genoese Garrison Probably Did Not Actually Happen

Gabriele de' Mussis's *Historia de Morbo* (c. 1348) is the source of the famous story that the Mongol khan Jani Beg ended the 1346 siege of Caffa by catapulting plague-infected corpses over the walls. De' Mussis was not at Caffa. The corpse-catapult story may be a literary invention. The Black Death still arrived in Italy from Caffa.

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