Joe Biden warned on Tuesday that Russia’s use of a nuclear weapon would be an ‘enormously serious mistake’, as Moscow claims Ukraine is preparing a ‘dirty bomb’, a claim denied by kyiv and Western countries .
“Russia would be making an immensely serious mistake if it used a tactical nuclear weapon,” the US president warned.
A radiological bomb or “dirty bomb” is made up of conventional explosives surrounded by radioactive materials intended to be scattered into dust at the time of the explosion.
Moscow raised the charges for the first time on Sunday in telephone conversations between Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and his American, French, British and Turkish counterparts, referring to “possible provocations by Ukraine with recourse to a +dirty bomb+”.
Paris, London and Washington together lambasted Moscow’s “false” statements on Monday. “No one would be fooled by an attempt to use this allegation as a pretext for escalation,” they stressed in a joint statement.
“I do not guarantee for the moment that this is a pretext operation. We don’t know,” Joe Biden said on Tuesday.