5 Hryven Chernobyl. Renaissance. The European Elk

Issued as part of Ukraine's ongoing "Chernobyl. Renaissance" series, which documents the unexpected ecological recovery of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone following the 1986 reactor disaster. With human activity largely absent for nearly four decades, the zone has become one of Europe's more unusual wildlife refuges — European elk populations among them — observed and studied by researchers who enter under strict permit.

The series has drawn attention from conservation bodies precisely because it uses a national coinage program to document rewilding in a contaminated landscape that no government planned to rehabilitate.