MOSCOW, October 25. /TASS/. Several inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will visit Kiev and Zheltye Vody in the coming days, with the preliminary results of their inspections appearing a week after their visit and the final results appearing at a much later date, Russian Permanent Representative to the International Organizations in Vienna Mikhail Ulyanov said during a Rossiya-24 TV broadcast.
"Yesterday morning, the Ukrainian Foreign Minister [Dmitry] Kuleba had a telephone conversation with [IAEA] Director General Rafael Grossi. Later the [IAEA] Secretariat in Vienna received a letter from the Ukrainian State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate asking to send inspectors to two sites. That is Kiev’s Institute for Nuclear Research of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and the State Mining and Processing plant in the settlement of Zheltye Vody in the Dnepropetrovsk Region. Since such appeals are allowed by existing agreements between states and the IAEA Secretariat, Grossi answered in the affirmative. And, I think, in the coming days several [IAEA] inspectors will head to Kiev and Zheltye Vody.
"Usually such inspections involve sampling, the samples take a lot of time to be analyzed, maybe two months, usually. So in a week or so we will have the preliminary results of these inspections, and the final results will not appear soon," Ulyanov said.
On Monday, Ukrainian top diplomat Dmitry Kuleba talked to Grossi over the phone and asked the IAEA to immediately send inspectors to the country’s nuclear facilities. In his turn, Ukrainian Defense Minister Alexey Reznikov said after talks with his counterparts from the UK, Turkey and France that Kiev was ready to receive any monitoring mission. Reznikov added that his counterparts told him about their talks with Russian top brass Sergey Shoigu, and shared Kiev’s position on the issue.
Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu on Sunday held telephone conversations with his counterparts: the UK’s Ben Wallace, France’s Sebastien Lecornu and Turkey’s Hulusi Akar. Shoigu conveyed to his colleagues concerns about Ukraine’s possible use of a dirty bomb. In addition, Shoigu spoke over the telephone with Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin on Friday and Sunday.