Ukraine live briefing: Russian ‘dirty bomb’ claims transparently false, White House says

White House spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Monday that the accusations are “false, and transparently so.”

Monday marks eight months since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, and the war grinds on. Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.

1. West rejects Russia’s ‘dirty bomb’ accusation

• Ukraine’s foreign minister invited the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Mariano Grossi, “to urgently send experts to peaceful facilities in Ukraine which Russia deceitfully claims to be developing a dirty bomb.” Dmytro Kuleba said on Twitter Monday that Grossi agreed. It’s the latest development in a back-and-forth between Moscow, Kyiv and Western powers over Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu’s unfounded claim that Ukraine is planning to use so-called dirty bombs — explosive weapons designed to widely disperse radioactive material — in the war.
• “The IAEA inspected one of these locations one month ago and all our findings were consistent with Ukraine’s safeguards declarations,” Grossi said in a statement on Monday. “No undeclared nuclear activities or material were found there.”
• “The world would see through any attempt to use this allegation as a pretext for escalation,” the U.S., British, and French foreign ministers said in a joint statement. “We further reject any pretext for escalation by Russia,” the Western diplomats added. Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in 1994 in return for a guarantee from Russia that it would not attack Ukraine.
• Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Russia would raise the accusation before the U.N. Security Council.
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia of manufacturing false threats in his nightly speech. “If Russia calls and says that Ukraine is allegedly preparing something, it means one thing: Russia has already prepared all this,” Zelensky said of Shoigu’s claims.

2. Battleground updates

• “Ukrainian efforts to defeat” Iranian-made drones used by Russia on the battlefield “are increasingly successful,” the British Defense Ministry said, citing claims by Zelensky that Ukrainian forces are intercepting up to 85 percent of the unmanned aerial vehicles’ attempted strikes. Ukrainian and U.S. officials say Russia has procured Shahed-136 “kamikaze” drones from Iran, which Tehran denies. Russia is likely having to use more of the drones “as a substitute for Russian-manufactured long-range precision weapons which are becoming increasingly scarce.”
• Ukraine still faces widespread power outages and cuts after Russian strikes pummeled the country’s energy infrastructure in recent days. Ukrenergo, the national electric transmission company, said it was forced to impose caps on electricity supply to seven regions of Ukraine, including around the capital, Kyiv, which will face some of the strictest restrictions. The company said the controlled blackouts would help its crews repair the equipment damaged by the strikes.
• Power outages — some scheduled as part of power rationing, others unexpected and unavoidable — have grown more frequent and widespread in Dnipro, a regional capital in central Ukraine, since Russia began sustained attacks on the country’s electrical infrastructure two weeks ago, The Washington Post reports. Targeting civilian infrastructure with no military purpose is a war crime.
• Russian-installed officials in the occupied city of Kherson invited male residents to join a militia tasked with defending the city as Moscow continues to order tens of thousands of residents to immediately leave in preparation for a Ukrainian counteroffensive. Kyiv’s forces hope to retake Kherson, the first major Ukrainian city Russian forces captured after invading the country.

3. Global impact

• Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke by phone Monday his Russian counterpart, Russian military Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov, according to a senior U.S. defense official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information. The two had not spoken since May. Details of the call have not been released. Milley also spoke with Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces. They exchanged assessments and the Milley affirmed U.S. support for Ukraine, according to a readout.
• Ukrainians should “choose the moment and the terms” of peace in the war with Russia, French President Emmanuel Macron said at a conference in Italy. Macron — who has previously encouraged dialogue with Moscow — said Europe’s balancing act of countering Russia while avoiding direct involvement in the conflict had created the conditions for Ukrainians to “choose peace.” Kyiv this month ruled out talks with Russia after it illegally annexed four Ukrainian regions.
• Ukraine’s Infrastructure Ministry accused Russia of “deliberately delaying” its grain initiative, the agency said in a Sunday Facebook post, reporting that ports were operating at 25 to 30 percent of their capacity. Ships of foodstuff and fertilizer leaving Ukraine under a United Nations-brokered arrangement have been vital to keeping global food prices down and averting worldwide famine, officials have said. But Ismini Palla, a U.N. spokeswoman for the Black Sea Grain Initiative, said in a statement to The Washington Post that more than 150 vessels are waiting near Istanbul to move, and that the Joint Coordination Center — which includes representatives from the U.N., Russia, Turkey and Ukraine — is “discussing ways to address the backlog.”
• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is set to represent the United States this week at a Crimea Platform summit, a forum hosted by Ukraine and focused on the peninsula that Russia illegally annexed in 2014. She said she and other leaders will “deliver an unmistakable statement of our solidarity with Ukraine in its fight for freedom.”

4. From our correspondents

Cyprus, a haven for Russian expats, welcomes techies fleeing Ukraine war: Since late September, when Putin announced his order to enlist at least 300,000 men to help his flagging invasion of Ukraine, hundreds of thousands of Russians have fled across borders.

Cyprus, a small, sunny island in the Mediterranean divided by its own historical territorial dispute between Turks and Greeks, remains one of the last few havens for Russians running away from the uncertainty and doom Putin’s war in Ukraine has created back home, writes Post correspondent Mary Ilyushina from Larnaca, Cyprus.

IT workers in particular started flocking here when Russian tanks began rolling into Ukraine in February, and so far, the door remains open even as other jurisdictions deny entry to Russian visitors. “We haven’t seen any signs of reversal in Cyprus’s policy,” said Oleg Reshetnikov, who moved to the island in 2014 and created CypRus_IT, a networking community for the thousands of Russian-speaking specialists.

Bryan Pietsch and Dan Lamothe contributed to this report.