The Chernobyl disaster occurred in 1986 in the Soviet Union (modern-day Ukraine), and official acknowledgement was delayed due to a news blackout. For several days, Soviet authorities did not publicly admit the scale of the accident. While the disaster became a significant moment in the eventual transparency policies of the late Soviet era, the Russian Federation—as the successor state to the USSR—has often been criticized for its handling of the legacy of the accident. There has been no single, formal "apology" from the Russian state for the Chernobyl disaster specifically, as the response was initially managed by the Soviet government, which later admitted the event was a "disaster" only after international pressure and detection of radioactive fallout.