Russia Planning Their Own Version of HBO’s Chernobyl That Blames Catastrophe on CIA

In response to the massively successful new HBO miniseries Chernobyl, a Russian TV broadcaster is planning to make a show supposedly correcting the record by promoting a wild conspiracy that blames the nuclear incident on the CIA.

“One theory holds that Americans had infiltrated the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and many historians do not deny that, on the day of the explosion, an agent of the enemy’s intelligence services was present at the station,” the Russian show’s director Alexei Muradov told the Moscow Times — a theory that the non-state funded paper said was crafted by “fringe conspiracy theorists.”

The Moscow Times went on to say that the HBO series “is a source of shame that the pro-Kremlin media apparently cannot live down,” since an American station is receiving praise for covering their country’s tragedy — which the Russian government has long tried to cover up. Specifically, the HBO series focuses on how the Soviet Union made the tragedy worse by trying to downplay the severity of the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Pripyat, Ukraine.

Muradov is creating his anti-Chernobyl series with Russian network NTV and has already started the initial photography for the show. The budget of the film has not been released, but the Hollywood Reporter reported that Russia’s culture ministry donated nearly half a million dollars to the project, as Muradov’s version will detail a pro-Kremlin conspiracy that claims a KGB intelligence officer attempted to stop the CIA’s plot.

The HBO miniseries, which was released on June 3, actually aired in Russia and received solid ratings, according to the Daily Mail.