Russian nuclear materials are secure.

At the same time, Russian nuclear specialists have been quick to pour cold water both on suggestions that the material was in fact HEU and on claims by Moldovan police that the material may ultimately be traceable to Russia. For one, the €20 million price tag quoted by the smugglers is way too low for real HEU, says Sergey Novikov, spokesman for Russia’s nuclear-energy corporation, Rosatom. Moreover, Rosatom claims that security in Russia’s nuclear installations is now so tight that “not even low-grade uranium has appeared on the black market” in more than a decade. Novikov says, “This Moldovan story is grandmother’s fairy tales.”

Experts in the U.S. agree that Russia has come a long way from the scary days of the early 1990s, when nuclear scientists went unpaid for months and guards at nuclear facilities left their posts to go foraging in the forests for food. Declassified documents from 1994 released earlier this month paint a disturbing picture of post-Soviet Russia, a place where “no system of nuclear accounting existed” and stolen nuclear materials began showing up on the black market in Leningrad, Istanbul, and Munich.

Since then, in large part thanks to billions in assistance from the U.S. government, Russia seems to have cleaned up its act. Harvard’s Matthew Bunn produced a landmark report last year that gave Moscow high marks for nuclear security. A revived Russian economy “has largely eliminated the 1990s-era desperation that created unique incentives and opportunities for nuclear theft,” Bunn wrote. And the “strengthened central control and the renewed strength of the FSB, the successor to the KGB, undoubtedly also contribute to deterring attempts at nuclear theft.” He concluded, “Overall, the risk of nuclear theft in Russia has been reduced to a fraction of what it was a decade ago.”