For several days, Russian media and government officials have been stoking fears of a “dirty bomb” allegedly being built in Ukraine. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the Kremlin has “concrete information about Ukrainian scientific institutes that have technologies that allow them to create a dirty bomb.” The State Department has posted more allegations on Twitter and Telegram – alongside what it calls “evidence” to support them.
A dirty bomb is the term given to a weapon of mass destruction consisting of a conventional explosive device that, when detonated, spreads radioactive material into the area.
Claim:
“According to the available information, two organizations in Ukraine were directly commissioned to build the so-called #dirtybomb. The works are in the final phase,” according to the Russian Foreign Ministry tweeted on October 24th. A second followed tweet: “The Kiev regime plans to camouflage the explosion of this type of ordnance under an extraordinary effect of a low-power Russian nuclear warhead containing highly enriched uranium in its charge.”
Fact check: FALSE.
The photos that Russia’s Foreign Ministry published in these tweets cannot prove the existence of an alleged dirty bomb in Ukraine. What the pictures show is something completely different than what is claimed.
The ministry claims that one of the photos shows a control room at the Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology. However, a reverse image search does not lead to the Ukraine, but to Russia, more precisely to Gatchina near St. Petersburg. The very first hit shows that exactly the same picture can be seen on the website of the Russian state nuclear energy company ROSATOM.
Left: Photo of a Russian research reactor accompanying a 2021 article on the ROSATOM website. Right: The Russian Foreign Ministry used the same photo to claim that Ukrainian institutes are building a dirty bomb. Image: Twitter/strana-rosatom.ru
The photo appears in a February 2021 report on Vladimir Putin’s opening of the PIK research reactor, dubbed the “world’s most powerful neutron source.” The state news agency TASS and the website atomic-energy.ru reported on the opening. They all use the same photo of the PIK reactor control room.
Therefore, the photo does not show the “Institute of Physics and Technology” in “Kharkov” (Kharkiv). It is a research nuclear reactor in Russia.
Slovenian smoke detectors
The main “evidence” presented in the Russian Foreign Ministry posts is a photo of clear plastic bags marked with the word “RADIOAKTIVNO” and the radiation warning symbol. The ministry claims this is evidence of the “development of ‘dirty bombs’ containing the radioactive substances “uranium-235, plutonium-239”.
Again, a reverse image search leads to older images and a completely different source. The photos appear to have been taken in Slovenia, which explains why the bags are marked “radioaktivno” – the Slovenian word for “radioactive”. In Ukrainian, “radioactive” is “radіоактивно”. Even if transliterated into the Latin alphabet, it would read “radioaktyvno”, not like the plastic bags in the photo.
On twitter, the Slovenian government publicly attributed the photo to the Slovenian Nuclear Waste Agency ARAO. DW contacted ARAO, where a spokesman confirmed that the agency took the photo in 2010.
Left: Detail of Russian Foreign Ministry tweet claiming Ukraine is developing a “dirty bomb”. Right: The original photo taken in 2010 by the Slovenian Nuclear Waste Management Agency ARAO. Image: Twitter/ARAO
“The photo used by the Russian Foreign Ministry in its Twitter post is an ARAO photo from 2010,” the Slovenian government confirmed, adding that the image was “misused and used without ARAO’s knowledge.”
ARAO said in a statement that the photo shows a plastic bag containing smoke detectors, which do not contain any of the radioactive substances the Russian Foreign Ministry lists under the photo. The photo was taken in a central nuclear waste storage facility near Ljubljana and is documented here (page 3) and here.
And a third photo in the tweet is also very different from what the ministry claims. The photo of a supposed “scientific research reactor” in Ukraine was actually taken in Russia.
No Ukrainian reactor: The original photo by the Diomedia agency shows the Beloyarsk nuclear reactor in Russia Photo: diomedia/Twitter
Here, too, a reverse image search returns numerous hits, including one from an image agency that describes the image in more detail. It is the interior of the Russian nuclear power plant Beloyarsk near Ekaterinburg.
Conclusion:
Some of the photos presented by the Russian Foreign Ministry as “evidence” are manipulative. They do not show parts of a dirty bomb in Ukraine, nor how it was made, nor places where such a bomb is made. Instead, these photos show Russian nuclear power plants — and smoke detectors in Slovenia.
Tatjana Schweizer and Tetjana Klug contributed to this report.
This article was translated from German.
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