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Russia blocks the UN agreement on nuclear disarmament due to criticism of the seizure of Zaporizhia
The tenth review conference of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) closed this Friday without an agreement after Russia vetoed a consensus statement due to criticism of its seizure of the Ukrainian atomic plant in Zaporizhia.
At a time when the war in Ukraine has again raised fears of a nuclear conflict, the international community has been unable to agree on a minimum at this meeting, considered a key date for atomic disarmament efforts.
Meeting last August 1 at the United Nations headquarters, the delegations of the 191 signatory countries of the NPT tried to agree on a final document with long negotiations that delayed the closing of the conference for hours.
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Clash over Zaporizhia
However, in the end, Russia's refusal to accept several paragraphs relating to the situation at the Zaporizhia plant and the need for it to return to the control of the competent Ukrainian authorities ruined those efforts on Friday.
The Moscow delegation has insisted that this was "politicized" and totally "unacceptable" language and has blamed Kyiv and its allies for the failure of the negotiations.
Russia accused the Western powers of having forced from the beginning of the conference questions about the war in Ukraine that, in its opinion, had nothing to do with the NPT.
Meanwhile, the European Union (EU) and other countries have insisted that the departure of Russian forces from Zaporizhia is essential.
That facility, the largest atomic plant in Europe, was taken over by Russian troops at the beginning of the war and in recent days has been the object of repeated attacks -of which Moscow and Kyiv accuse each other- that have set off alarms in the face of a possible disaster.
"The last-minute changes that Russia was looking for were not minor," said US Representative Adam Scheinman, who accused Moscow of seeking to shield with them its "objective of erasing Ukraine from the map."
The complicated search for a consensus led by the president of the conference, the Argentine Gustavo Zlauvinen, left a final draft that did not fully satisfy almost anyone, but that all the countries except Russia were willing to accept.
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Nuclear risk
Closing this conference with the agreement was seen as a particularly important task given the current strong international tensions and the resurgence of fears of a nuclear conflict that have been seen around the war in Ukraine since the NPT is the main instrument of non-proliferation and disarmament.
At the opening, the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, had warned that the world is "just one misunderstanding or a miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation", for which he demanded agreements from the powers to reduce this serious threat.
"We find ourselves at a time in history where our world is increasingly plagued by conflict and, most alarmingly, the growing prospect of the unthinkable: nuclear war. At this time, it is imperative that we seek to amplify what unites, not what divides us", the president of the conference pointed out this Friday minutes before Russia blocked the text.
Activist groups seeking disarmament or the elimination of nuclear weapons were very disappointed with the result of the meeting, stressing that the countries were not even able to agree on a text that they already considered very watered down due to pressure from the official nuclear powers. (United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom).
"Faced with an unacceptably dangerous global situation, the NPT review conference achieved nothing," said Beatrice Fihn, the executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).
Although the war in Ukraine made this a particularly complicated meeting, it is not the first time that the periodic review of the NPT has been closed without consensus, as this already happened in the last edition, held seven years ago.
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