MOSCOW, April 18. /TASS/. Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev has accused the foreign ministers of the G7 countries of lying and mendacity over their calls for Russia to affirm that it stands against nuclear war.
"What lying bastards! They themselves dropped nuclear bombs but show no remorse. They’re forever speaking with a forked tongue, telling bald-faced lies to their own people as well as to outsiders, and then they claim that it’s our country that is spreading ‘false information’ about Ukraine. They’re now demanding that Russia provide them with some sort of guarantees with regards to nuclear weapons, but in reality they’re hinting at a future nuclear conflict between our country and NATO," Medvedev wrote on Telegram on Tuesday.
He pointed out that the G7 foreign ministers’ meeting was taking place in Japan. "It’s where hundreds of thousands of people died from atomic bombs. It’s a country whose leaders are, in effect, spitting on the graves of their fellow citizens who died at the hands of the Americans," he noted, adding: "What a disgrace!"
The G7 foreign ministers earlier adopted a joint statement calling on Moscow to prove - "in word and in deed" - that there could be no winners in a nuclear war and thus such a war must never be fought.
Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on the sidelines of the event that "Hiroshima <...> together with Nagasaki offers the most powerful reminder of the unprecedented devastation and immense human suffering that the people of Japan experienced as a result of the atomic bombings in 1945." However, he failed to specify that it was the US that had carried out the atomic bombings of Japan.
The US conducted the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki towards the end of World War II, with the initial goal of accelerating Japan’s surrender. The US bombings are to date the only examples of the wartime use of nuclear weapons in human history. The first US atomic bomb instantly killed 70,000 to 100,000 people in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, with many survivors dying later of radiation sickness and other consequences. According to the latest estimates, the Hiroshima bombing ultimately claimed over 308,000 lives. Nagasaki came under a US atomic bomb attack two days later, on August 8, 1945. About 70,000 people were killed on the spot and the city was wiped off the face of the Earth. The number of victims of the second attack exceeded 175,000.