Russia blocks UN declaration on nuclear disarmament | Abroad

The 191 countries that have signed the NPT, the treaty to combat the proliferation of nuclear weapons, have been meeting at the United Nations headquarters in New York since 1 August. But after a month of negotiations and a closing session postponed by several hours on Friday, “the conference is unable to reach an agreement,” said the review conference chairman, Argentine Gustavo Zlauvinen, after Russia’s intervention.

Although the decisions are taken unanimously, the Russian representative, Igor Vishnevetsky, complained that the draft of the closing statement, over thirty pages long, was “unbalanced”. “Our delegation has important objections to some paragraphs that are blatantly political,” said Vishenvetsky. He repeated several times that Russia was not the only country to object to the text in general.

According to sources close to the negotiations, Russia was particularly opposed to a few paragraphs about the Ukrainian nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhya, which is occupied by Russia. The closing text expressed “great concern” about military activities around Ukrainian nuclear power plants, especially Zaporizhzhya’s. Ukraine’s loss of control over the plant is also a source of concern, as is “the significant impact on security”.

There have been some sensitive topics of discussion over the past four weeks, most notably the Iranian nuclear program and the North Korean nuclear tests. At the previous conference in 2015, the parties also failed to reach an agreement on the substantive issues.

In any case, “what’s really problematic, text or no text, is that nothing is being done to reduce the current level of nuclear threat,” said Beatrice Fihn, who leads the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). The draft of the closing text was “very weak, far from reality,” she said. She lacked “concrete commitments to disarm”.

At the start of the conference, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had stated that the “nuclear threat had not been seen since the end of the Cold War”. “Today, humanity is one misunderstanding, one error of judgment, away from nuclear destruction,” Guterres said.