The Federal Security Service (FSB) of Russia announced on Friday that it had detained 5 people who tried to buy a kilogram of the radioactive isotope cesium-137 for a citizen of Ukraine, TASS reported with reference to Reuters.

The FSB said that these individuals were supposed to remove the element from Russia in order to use it to organize an “alleged WMD incident” to discredit Russia.

Reuters notes that it has not been able to independently verify this information and that the Ukrainian government has not yet commented on it.

The FSB’s statements came after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi said on Thursday that he had received reports that Russia was considering a terrorist attack on the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, which Moscow forces were able to capture in the first stage of the invasion.

Kremlin spokesman Dmytro Peskov responded by saying that this was a “lie” and that inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency had just visited the plant and gave a very good assessment.

Ukraine accuses Russia of preparing a provocation at the Zaporizhia NPP

But the Ukrainian leader repeated his accusations on Thursday night in his daily address to the nation, stressing that the “de-occupation” of the plant by Russian forces is mandatory.

“Our principle is simple: the world must know what the occupier is preparing. Anyone who knows should act. Of course, after Russia’s terrorist attack on the Kakhovskaya HPP and targeted terrorist attacks on other dams and energy facilities, no one in this world should have any illusions about Russia anymore,” he said.

Russia is now the world’s center of cynicism, and from here can issue any order for any evil they hope to disguise as a catastrophe. There is enough power in the world to prevent any radioactive incident, let alone a radioactive disaster. Everyone understands that the spy services of different countries can send the right signals and can pressure. This is necessary,” Zelensky emphasized.

The Ukrainian president’s comments came after Kyiv’s head of military intelligence, General Kyrylo Budanov, accused Russian occupation forces of “mining” a cooling reservoir used to cool reactors at the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant earlier this week.

“(…) The most terrible thing is that the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant was additionally mined during this time … namely, the cooling pond was in operation,” Kyrylo Budanov said on Tuesday in his first video intervention after the Russian media wrote, that he was seriously wounded during a rocket attack on the building where his office is located.

The Russians are reviving the thesis about the alleged Ukrainian “dirty bomb”.

But the arrests, announced by the FSB on Friday, came after Russia renewed its accusations earlier this week that Ukraine was preparing to detonate a “dirty bomb” to blame Moscow.

The head of Russian intelligence Serhii Naryshkin said on Monday that his service has information that a batch of “irradiated fuel” was secretly sent from the Rivne nuclear power plant in western Ukraine to be buried in the Chernobyl spent nuclear fuel storage facility.

This theory of an alleged Ukrainian “dirty bomb” was first floated by senior officials in Moscow last October, when its forces were losing ground in southern Ukraine during a counteroffensive launched by Kiev.

Russia has not yet provided any concrete evidence to support its allegations.

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