Pavel Podvig, an expert in the nuclear forces of Russia and former Soviet states, told PolitiFact that the claim that Ukraine still has nuclear weapons is "completely false." The country has not tried to develop them before or after the start of the invasion, Podvig said, and "there is absolutely no evidence that Ukraine has ever worked on a ‘dirty bomb.’" Ukraine also dismantled its nuclear missiles and destroyed its nuclear missile silos.Īccording to the fact sheet, the small quantity of highly enriched uranium still present in Ukraine "is intended for specific scientific purposes" and "is well below the amount needed to produce a nuclear device." Ukraine does not have "uranium enrichment or spent fuel reprocessing capabilities" nor "substantial quantities of separated plutonium." But after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, Ukraine signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and transferred the weapons to Russia by 1996. The Soviet military kept nuclear weapons on Ukrainian territory during the Cold War, according to a June 2022 fact sheet by the U.S. Nine countries in the world are known to have nuclear bombs: Russia, the United States, China, France, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea, according to a January 2022 fact sheet by the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan organization in Washington, D.C., that promotes arms control. Its nuclear materials are now used for peaceful purposes, such as academic research and nuclear forensics. Ukraine also dismantled or destroyed its nuclear missiles and silos. The country used to have Soviet-era nuclear weapons but returned them to Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed. 19 tweet by BBC Monitoring journalist Francis Scarr, who summarized in English what was said in Russian in the TV clip.Ī BBC spokesperson said Scarr "reports on the output of Russian TV" and that the tweet "reported a statement made on Russian state-controlled TV, and attributed the statement to that source." The spokesperson noted that "BBC Monitoring’s activities include investigating and exposing disinformation."Ĭontrary to Russia’s repeated claims, Ukraine has neither a nuclear bomb nor a "dirty bomb," according to experts and watchdogs. The Instagram post’s text and the footage match an Oct. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.) The post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. Ukraine has a nuclear bomb primed in Mykolaiv which it will detonate and then blame on Russia so that the US has a justification for getting directly involved in the war and launching missiles on Russia." 21 Instagram post included footage from a Russian TV show and featured text saying, "Today on Russian TV. Similar allegations have circulated on social media.Īn Oct. They are easier to make and considerably less deadly than nuclear weapons, but they can contaminate targeted areas with radioactive particles and cause panic. "Dirty bombs" use conventional explosives to spread radioactive material, according to a fact sheet by the U.S. 23, when Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu called his counterparts in the United States, the United Kingdom and France to say that Ukraine is preparing a "provocation" with a radiological device known as a "dirty bomb." Russia says the US’s post-Cold War dominance is crumbling.Since invading Ukraine, Russia has repeatedly claimed that Ukraine is going to detonate a nuclear bomb on its own territory. The US casts China as its biggest competitor and Russia as its biggest nation-state threat, while US President Joe Biden argues that this century will be defined by an existential contest between democracies and autocracies. Russia and the US, by far the world’s biggest nuclear powers, have both expressed regret about the steady disintegration of arms-control treaties which sought to slow the Cold War arms race and reduce the risk of nuclear war.īut they are also developing a range of new weapons systems, including hypersonic ones, as is China. Russia installed its first Avangard-equipped missile in 2019 at the same Orenburg facility. The Zvezda television channel owned by the Russian Defence Ministry on Thursday showed a ballistic missile being transported to a launch silo, slowly raised into a vertical position and then lowered into a shaft in the Orenburg region near Kazakhstan. Keep reading list of 4 items list 1 of 4 Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 665 list 2 of 4 Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 664 list 3 of 4 Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 663 list 4 of 4 North Korea resumes missile launches in ‘threat to peace and stability’ end of listĪs it approaches its target, the Avangard detaches from the rocket and can manoeuvre sharply outside the trajectory of the rocket at hypersonic speeds of up to 27 times the speed of sound (about 21,000 miles per hour or 34,000 kilometres per hour).
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