General Discussion

"Recovering" - You don't recover what doesn't belong to you.

"An objective" - Robbing the money out of a vault is also an "objective," I suppose, but the press would not likely describe a robbery this way

"one of his stated aims" - Have there actually been stated aims of the illegal and unprovoked attack?

"an operation to retrieve" - We retrieve things that we have lost. We don't retrieve things that don't belong to us. An operation to retrieve something that belongs to somebody else is called a robbery or a heist.

"a complex mission to render safe" - a heist

"where the uranium was hidden." - Yes, like money is hidden in a safe