Russia has downplayed the risk of a dirty bomb plot in Ukraine just days after claiming Ukrainian officials planned to stage such an attack following a chorus of NATO warnings rejecting the allegation.
“We have got what we wanted,” Russian deputy ambassador Dmitry Polyanskiy told reporters at the United Nations. “If this all does not happen, I do not mind people saying that Russia is crying wolf because we are speaking about a terrible disaster that might potentially threaten the whole Earth.”
That sanguine tone makes a marked contrast with charges leveled over the first two days of the week as Russian military officials claimed that Ukrainian officials had reached the “final stage” of a scheme to detonate a dirty bomb and blame Moscow. Western officials denounced the allegation as “transparently false” and aired their suspicions that the Kremlin had a similar plan in mind.
“Russia often accuses others of what they intend to do themselves,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Tuesday while visiting the USS George H.W. Bush, the American aircraft carrier leading NATO’s Neptune Strike exercises in the Mediterranean. “We have seen this pattern before, from Syria to Ukraine. Russia must not use false pretexts for further escalation. The world is watching closely.”
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Stoltenberg’s repeated warnings amplified the message of the United States, France, and the United Kingdom. The trio of nuclear-armed NATO allies emphasized that “the world would see through any attempt to use this allegation as a pretext for escalation” just hours after Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu called his counterparts in each country to lodge the accusation against Kyiv.
“The same message should be resonating, should be going from as many sources as possible, that there’s no way that Russia would gain any operational or economic advantage by doing something like that,” a senior European official said.
Russia has made a series of false flag allegations against Ukraine throughout the war — the Kremlin denied having any intention of invading Ukraine in the days prior to the launch of the offensive and then claimed that the war was forced upon them by Ukrainian threats. That fundamental allegation was soon followed by a charge early in the war that Ukraine had laid the groundwork for biological attacks on Russia.
“There are a lot of claims that we made about things that never happened,” Polyanskiy acknowledged. “But shouldn’t we view it through the perspective that they never happened because we had raised those claims and Ukrainians were afraid to proceed with those provocations?”
Ukrainian officials have invited the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency to send a team of inspectors to the two facilities Russia claims are the home of the dirty bomb research. The Russian envoy predicted that the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors would not be able to find anything.
“The problem is that dirty bomb is not a very sophisticated device,” Polyanskiy said. “There is a big fuss now in the Ukrainian ruling circles because of the campaign that we started to launch and a lot of indications that they are trying to wind down this program.”
The IAEA specializes in detecting whether nuclear material has been present in a facility where it ought not to be found.
“The IAEA inspected one of these locations one month ago, and all our findings were consistent with Ukraine’s safeguards declarations,” IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi said this week. “No undeclared nuclear activities or material were found there.”
Polyanskiy insisted that the allegation was a worthy topic of U.N. Security Council discussion.
“We wanted to raise this issue, explain our position to the colleagues, appeal to their responsible attitude,” he said. “Of course, Western countries are mostly saying that this is all Russian propaganda … but we are quite satisfied because we raised their awareness of this fact.”
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But he seemed to leave the door open to renewing the controversy at a later date. “I am not an expert, and of course, it is between Ukraine and the IAEA,” he said. “But I doubt if there is a possibility to be 100% ironclad sure that there are no activities of this kind, even after this visit. But that is my private opinion.”
