- Russian troops were "walking away" from Chernobyl, an unnamed US defense official told AFP Wednesday.
- The troops look like they are being redeployed to Belarus, the official said per AFP.
- Russia claims to have scaled back its assault, but Ukraine says it is skeptical of the pullback.
Russian troops were "walking away" from Chernobyl around a month after capturing the highly contaminated site from Ukraine, an unnamed US defense official told AFP Wednesday.
The news comes as Russia claimed to be scaling back its military assault on Ukraine's northern front.
"Chernobyl is [an] area where they are beginning to reposition some of their troops — leaving, walking away from the Chernobyl facility and moving into Belarus," the US official said speaking about Russia, per AFP.
"We think that they are leaving, I can't tell you that they're all gone."
The nuclear power plant is around 10 miles from the border with Belarus, a Russian ally which has served as a staging point for the invasion.
The Chernobyl decommissioned nuclear power plant, the site of the world's worst nuclear disaster in 1986, has been under the control of Russian troops since the first days of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
The power plant is now inactive but is still undergoing extensive work to fully decommission and decontaminate the site.
Russian troops forced the workers at the plant to stay on-site for almost a month before they were allowed to be relieved by volunteer co-workers.
Russia also took control of another nuclear site in Ukraine, the active nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia, on March 4. According to the latest reports, that plant was still under control of Russian troops.
The invasion of nuclear sites by the military caused outrage among nuclear experts.
Several told Insider that the risk of a catastrophic nuclear accident in Ukraine remained low, but was higher because of the military activity, which puts strain on safety systems there as well as the staff operating the facilities.
Ukraine has expressed skepticism about Russia's military pullback, claiming that Russian forces were simply reorganizing. Some areas where Russia said it would leave, including Chernihiv and parts of the Kyiv region, remained under heavy attack.
"We see the accumulation of Russian troops for new strikes in Donbas," Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Wednesday, referring to the eastern region where Ukraine has been battling separatists for years.
"We are getting ready for this."