![]() ![]() The spikes in these narratives spread across the last eight months come after Ukrainian successes, Stepanenko says. Russia has repeatedly brought these claims to the United Nations. Stepanenko says Moscow has waged a very similar propaganda campaign around Ukraine’s supposed “biolabs.” Since the war began, the Kremlin has accused Ukraine of running US-funded bioweapons facilities, suggesting that Kyiv was set to release a deadly virus into the Russian population. This invented threat quickly became an excuse to invoke the threat of nuclear war. The claims became more elaborate: Pro-Kremlin accounts began suggesting that Kyiv wouldn’t just detonate a dirty bomb, but that it had the missile systems capable of launching them well into Russian territory. RIA Novosti, a state-run wire service, quoted an anonymous government official in early March who claimed Ukraine “ the Chernobyl nuclear power plant zone as a site for the development of nuclear weapons.” When Putin’s war started, the nuclear specter continued to be a convenient theme for domestic audiences. ![]() One lawmaker, Andrei Kartapolov, told audiences that the invasion was necessary so that Russian forces could seize Ukrainian nuclear plants and prevent Zelensky “ from building a dirty bomb.” That rhetoric made it to Russian state TV. “A healthy person … would not jokingly, let alone seriously, threaten the world with a nuclear bomb,” Kots said, parroting the talking point that Zelensky was an avid drug user.“They still have Chernobyl,” Kots continued, and referenced “the nationalists' wet dreams of a ‘dirty bomb.’” Those threats of a dirty bomb, one Telegram page associated with the Russian-baked Donbas separatists claimed, created “an ideological and political platform for launching a military operation.” “Zelensky just went crazy,” wrote Alexander Kots,a pro-Kremlin reporter who is considered close to the Russian war effort and has frequently been embedded with the Russian army, on Telegram in February. Pro-Russian Telegram channels lit up, casting Zelensky’s statements as a declaration of nuclear war. Without a meeting to resolve the issues between Russia and Ukraine, Zelensky said, Ukraine “will have every right to believe that the Budapest Memorandum is not working and all the package decisions of 1994 are in doubt.” ![]() Zelensky called out the other signatories to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum-Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom-which had agreed that the three former Soviet states would give up their nuclear weapons to Russia in exchange for assurances of their sovereignty. Nevertheless, the basic claim remained a constant reference for those pro-Kremlin Telegram accounts-appearing in hundreds of posts over the last eight months, being viewed hundreds of thousands of times.ĭays before Russia steamrolled across the border in February, comments made by Ukrainian president Volodmyr Zelensky helped to revive the allegations. The video, however, was quickly debunked-the Ukrainian-language video is rife with spelling mistakes and shows common industrial equipment, according to the Ukrainian fact-check organization StopFake. ![]()
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