October 21, 2024
By Carl Schreck, Mark Krutov and Sergei Dobrynin
RFE/RL
The UN’s nuclear agency has financed Russian state scientific research in Crimea since Moscow’s seizure of the Ukrainian peninsula in 2014, an RFE/RL investigation has found — funding that critics call tantamount to legitimizing Russian aggression against its neighbor.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s watchdog to ensure the peaceful use of nuclear energy, signed at least two agreements with Russian-based research institutes for studies that included field work in Crimea, which Russia occupied in a military operation in March 2014, internal agency records obtained by RFE/RL show.
The UN rejected Moscow’s claim to Crimea in a General Assembly resolution adopted after the Russian land grab in 2014, and IAEA chief Rafael Grossi has said the agency he leads is committed to the UN Charter’s principle that “national borders are not to be changed by force.”
Two IAEA research contracts with Russian state scientific institutions that involved field work in Crimea were signed between 2016 and 2019, and the first one was extended in the summer of 2019, records obtained by RFE/RL show.
While the contracts are relatively small in size and scope, they highlight the turbulent diplomatic and bureaucratic terrain the IAEA has had to navigate following the aggression Russia launched against Ukraine in 2014 and escalated to all-out war with the 2022 invasion.
The IAEA has previously been swept up in disputes over Crimea’s status given Russia’s de facto control over a research nuclear reactor there and Ukraine’s legal claim to the peninsula, which is recognized by the overwhelming majority of the international community.
Ukraine and its Western allies have called on the IAEA to refrain from actions suggesting recognition of Russia’s takeover of Crimea, while Russia in 2015 refused to approve the IAEA’s annual report because it listed a reactor in the Crimean city of Sevastopol as located in Ukraine.
The IAEA said in a statement to RFE/RL that the agency continues to recognize Crimea as Ukrainian in line with the 2014 UN General Assembly resolution. It described the studies as being of a “purely technical nature” and said they “do not constitute any change in the agency’s position on the status of Crimea.”
“The designations employed by the counterparts, and the presentation of material in their reports, do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the IAEA concerning the legal status of any country or territory or of its authorities,” an IAEA spokesperson said.
The spokesperson additionally described the counterparty for one of the projects — the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), an international research center based in the town of Dubna outside Moscow — as “not a Russian organization but an International Intergovernmental Scientific Research Organization located in Russia.”
(Following publication of this story, an IAEA spokesperson said that its research agreement with the JINR had “inadvertently included Sevastopol” and that “no publications were made by this institute under this contract referring to work done in Crimea.”)
Ukraine’s permanent diplomatic mission in Vienna, where the IAEA is headquartered, told RFE/RL that no IAEA-sponsored research projects in Crimea had been approved by the Ukrainian government.
“Our position remains clear: Ukraine resolutely opposes any international projects or any other activities in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, including the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol, as this violates our state’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” the mission said in an e-mailed statement.
Russia’s permanent diplomatic mission in Vienna did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
‘Russian Coastal Areas’
The Russian research contract that was granted an extension in 2019 was initially signed in September 2016 with the JINR. The project focused on the study of pollution trends “in the Russian coastal areas of the Black Sea” using “nuclear and related analytical techniques.”
While the study published in May 2019 did not mention Crimea or any of its locations, the scope of the research project described in the JINR agreement with the IAEA specifically stated that the study would involve research in Sevastopol.
The JINR also specifically stated in its proposal for the research contract submitted in June 2016 that field work would be carried out in Sevastopol. The proposal said this work would be conducted together with the Sevastopol-based Institute of Biology of the Southern Seas, which Russian occupation authorities took over following their seizure of Crimea and folded into the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The proposal for the research contract estimated the total cost of the project at 165,000 euros, with a request of 15,000 euros from the IAEA.
The listed chief scientific investigator for the project, JINR professor Marina Frontasyeva, did not respond to an e-mailed inquiry about the field work in Crimea specified in the proposal and the IAEA contract.
One of Frontasyeva’s previous co-authors, Natalya Milchakova, is the co-chair of the Sevastopol branch of the People’s Front, a pro-Kremlin organization founded on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s initiative.
In March, Milchakova helped organize an awards ceremony for Sevastopol residents who have provided assistance to Russian forces fighting in Moscow’s war of aggression against Ukraine, and said they “bring our victory closer.”
The second IAEA contract reviewed by RFE/RL was signed with Russia’s Federal Center for Animal Health, a research institute based in the city of Vladimir, 200 kilometers east of Moscow.
The 60,000-euro contract was granted for a project to study Avian flu viruses from migratory wild birds using stable isotope analysis. While the contract does not mention Crimea, a “final report for contracts” for the project submitted in September 2023 stated that feather samples from birds were gathered in the “Republic of Crimea.”
The chief researcher on the project, Viktor Irza, did not respond to an e-mailed inquiry about the project.
‘An Ugly Story’
Ukrainian nuclear safety expert Olha Kosharna, a former board member of Ukraine’s State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate, says the IAEA’s sponsorship of research projects in Russian-occupied Ukraine is “an ugly story.”
“This is a violation, of course, because the IAEA officially considers Sevastopol to be Ukrainian territory, as are the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, the Zaporizhzhya region, and all the occupied territories of Ukraine,” Kosharna told RFE/RL.
The IAEA annual reports continue to list the Sevastopol-based research reactor as located in Ukraine, though language suggesting tacit recognition of Russia’s occupation of Ukraine has surfaced elsewhere in the IAEA.
The participant list for an upcoming IAEA-sponsored event in Moscow on radiation therapy includes two individuals from the Russian delegation who are listed as being from “Donetsk, Russian Federation,” according to internal IAEA records reviewed by RFE/RL.
Donetsk is a major city in eastern Ukraine that was seized by Russian-backed forces in 2014, along with parts of the surrounding Donetsk region and the neighboring Luhansk region, and has remained under Moscow’s control since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Carl Schreck is an award-winning investigative journalist who serves as RFE/RL’s enterprise editor. He has covered Russia and the former Soviet Union for more than 20 years, including a decade in Moscow. He has led investigations into corruption, cronyism, and disinformation campaigns in Russia and Central Asia, as well as on poisoning attacks against Kremlin opponents and assassinations of Iranian exiles in the West. Schreck joined RFE/RL in 2014.