Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has defiled the memories of the hundreds of thousands who perished in the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has claimed on Saturday.
The comments were in response to a warning issued by Kishida and US President Joe Biden, that if Russia uses nuclear weapons in Ukraine it would be an “act of hostility against humanity and unjustifiable.” The two leaders issued the statement after talks in Washington, DC on Friday.
Writing on Telegram, Medvedev, who serves as the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, described the statement as “hideous cringe.”
“I will not even comment on the paranoia over the nuclear plans of our country,” he added.
Russian officials have repeatedly stated that Moscow does not intend to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. In October, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that doing so “would make neither political, nor military sense.” Under its official nuclear doctrine, Russia would only use the weapons in response to an attack with weapons of mass destruction or when there is “a threat to the existence of the state as a whole.”
Medvedev also said that Kishida was “talking nonsense about Russia in a degrading loyalist frenzy” which has led to him “betraying the memory of hundreds of thousands of Japanese who were burned in the nuclear fire of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
The former president went on to say that the Japanese PM “does not care one bit that the only country that effectively used nuclear weapons was the United States,” and “their only victim was his motherland.” He added that Kishida should demand that the US president repent for the attack, but he is just “attending personnel for Americans. And servants cannot be courageous.”
The atomic bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki took place on August 6 and 9, 1945, respectively, at the end of WWII, and remains the only instance in which nuclear weapons have been used in combat. The death toll in the two blasts is estimated at 70,000 to 135,000 in Hiroshima, and 60,000 to 80,000 in Nagasaki.