"The Russian side has now issued a warning. Russia's warning is aimed at preventing Ukraine from using a 'dirty bomb'," Zhou Rong, political commentator and researcher at China's Renmin University told Sputnik. "This warning is sincerely aimed at maintaining peace and stability, and not at escalating the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The use of a 'dirty bomb' is absolutely unacceptable. The use of a dirty bomb would mean an environmental and humanitarian catastrophe, an expansion of the scope of war and a change in the nature of war."
Last week, Russia raised the alarm over the Kiev regime's potential false flag related to the detonation of the so-called "dirty bomb," a "radiological dispersal device" (RDD) that combines a conventional explosive with radioactive material. The apparent purpose of the provocation is to blame Moscow for the resulting radioactive contamination amid the ongoing Russian special military operation to demilitarize and de-Nazify Ukraine.
On October 23, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu told his French, UK, US, and Turkish counterparts that Kiev may be preparing a false flag operation involving RDD. However, the US, Britain and France shrugged off Moscow's warning in a joint statement early Monday, denouncing it as "a pretext for escalation by Russia." For its part, the Kremlin highlighted that the threat of Kiev using a "dirty bomb" is real, whether Western countries want to believe in the danger or not.
"Today, the US, UK and France say they don't heed Russian warnings that Ukraine might use a dirty bomb," noted Zhou. "I think their behavior is based on political necessity. Whether or not Ukraine uses the bomb, at present Western countries cannot openly accept these threats. However, since there is a risk of a dirty bomb being used, defense chiefs can discuss the matter privately, while publicly the West will still continue to defend Ukraine."
The news of Kiev's potential nuclear provocation has reverberated throughout Chinese social media. Chinese users of the Weibo platform condemned the plot, suggesting that the US could be well aware of the Ukrainian regime's plans and called upon the UN to investigate the matter.
Meanwhile, on Monday, the Russian mission in the UN sent a letter to Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warning about the threat of Kiev's dirty bomb provocation and requested a UN Security Council meeting to discuss the matter. On the same day, Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia's Radiation, Chemical and Biological Defense Troops, revealed that the Russian military obtained information about contacts between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's office and UK representatives on the issue of nuclear weapons technology.
Remarkably, on February 19, Zelensky floated the idea of Kiev dropping its non-nuclear status under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum while delivering his speech at the Munich security conference. Moscow has repeatedly warned the West that these were no empty threats: Ukraine has the technological expertise and ample radioactive material reserves to build nuclear devices.
According to Igor Kirillov, Kiev possesses some 1,500 tons' worth of spent nuclear fuel from the country’s three operating nuclear power plants, and 22,000 spent fuel assemblies stored at the defunct Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant’s waste repositories, including Uranium-235 and Plutonium-239 – the primary fissile isotopes used in nuclear weapons. On top of this, the Ukrainian regime has the capacity to store tens of thousands of cubic meters of radioactive waste materials at several waste disposal facilities and can mine up to 1,000 tons of uranium ore annually, according to the Russian Ministry of Defense.
It was earlier reported that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will dispatch its representatives to visit Zholtye Vody and Kiev. According to insiders, the administration of the Eastern Mining and Processing Plant located in the town of Zholtye Vody in Ukraine’s Dnepropetrovsk region, as well as the Kiev Institute for Nuclear Research, were tasked with making the "dirty bomb."