If they have the money to buy Mercedes cars, they can find the money to help the invalids

Demonstrator

Some 15,000 people joined a march through the centre of Kiev, just two weeks before the nuclear plant is due to be closed for good.

Widows carried portraits of their dead husbands - the victims of radiation-induced diseases - and mother pushed disabled children in pushchairs.

Living death

Speakers told them not to believe the Ukrainian Government when it said there was no money.

Chernobyl: Closure looms

"If they have the money to buy Mercedes cars," speakers told the crowd, "they can find the money to help the invalids."

Soon after the disaster, the victims were re-housed and given fairly generous allowances.

But reductions in their rent and fuel bills have been cancelled, and now - with an austerity budget looming - they fear more cuts.

One demonstrator was indignant that she and other widows like her were being treated worse than war widows - at least their husbands died instantly, she said, while the men in Chernobyl suffered a kind of living death.

Foreign loans in doubt

The demonstration comes as preparations are being made to close the Chernobyl reactor for good - but the financial arrangements surrounding the closure are still contentious.

Foreign aid is due to pay to make the site safe, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development is discussing loans to fund two replacement nuclear plants.

But these loans are now in doubt - partly because Ukraine is finding it difficult to meet EBRD conditions, and partly because environmental activists in Europe are warning that even the new reactors could be seriously unsafe.