After the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, 45 km far from Vilcha, the settlement was not included into the "Exclusion Zone" before 1993.

During 1993 to 1996, most of the 2,000 residents moved to Kharkiv Oblast, where they founded a new Vilcha (709 km away), a few kilometres south of the town of Vovchansk.

[2] The ghost town, today one of the checkpoints to the Exclusion Zone,[3] was resettled by a few samosely some years later.

[citation needed] Located near the borders with Zhytomyr Oblast and the Belarusian Oblast of Gomel, Vilcha is located in the middle of the natural region of Polesia, close to its radioecological reserve.

[6] The settlement is crossed in the middle by the regional highway P02 Ovruch-Kyiv (150 km south), and is the southern end of the T1035 road from Oleksandrivka, Naroulia District, in Belarus, that continues as P37 highway to Naroulia and Mazyr (95 km north).