After a month of negotiations, the draft text, largely symbolic, was rejected by Moscow. Russia would not have accepted certain declarations on the Zaporijia power plant, which it currently occupies in Ukraine.
Le Monde with AFP
Russia prevented the adoption of a joint declaration on Friday, August 27 at the end of the four weeks of the UN examination conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (TNP), denouncing “political” terms.
The 191 countries signatory to the TNP, which aims to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, promote complete disarmament and promote cooperation for peaceful use of nuclear energy, had gathered at the United Nations in New York since The 1 er August.
But despite a month of negotiations and a final session postponed several hours on Friday, “the conference is not in a position to reach an agreement,” said the conference president, Argentinian Gustavo Zlauvinen, after The intervention of Russia.
While decisions are taken by consensus, the Russian representative, Igor Vishnevetsky, has indeed denounced the absence of “balance” in the final text of more than 30 pages. “Our delegation has a key objection on certain paragraphs which are shamelessly political,” he said, repeating several times that Russia was not the only country to have objections on the text in general.
“Humanity has an error in calculating the annihilation”
According to sources close to negotiations, Russia has particularly opposed paragraphs concerning the Ukrainian nuclear power plant in Zaporijia, occupied by the Russian soldiers. The last text on the table, seen by the France-Presse agency (AFP), underlined a “great concern” concerning military activities around Ukrainian power plants, in particular Zaporijia, the “loss of control” by Ukraine of these sites and “the important impact on safety”.
Other sensitive elements for certain states were also under discussion during these four weeks, including the Iranian nuclear program and the North Korean nuclear trials. During the last examination conference in 2015, the parties had not been able to reach an agreement on substantive issues.
In all cases, “what is really problematic is that with or without text, it does nothing to reduce the level of nuclear threat at the moment,” Beatrice Fihn, who heads on Friday, The international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons (ICAN). The draft text was “very weak, and detached from reality,” she added, noting the absence “of concrete commitments of disarmament”.
At the opening of the conference, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres considered that such “nuclear danger was not known since the apogee of the Cold War”. “Today, humanity is a misunderstanding, an error in calculating nuclear annihilation,” he warned.