Russia blocked the adoption of a joint agreement on the United Nations nuclear disarmament treaty, which criticized Moscow’s military’s seizure of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
Igor Vishnevetsky, deputy director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Department of Nonproliferation and Arms Control, said the final draft, which was more than 30 pages long, lacked “balance. “
“Our delegation has a key objection to some paragraphs that are clearly political in nature,” he said, adding that Russia is not the only country questioning the draft text.
The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which 191 signatories review every five years, aims to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, promote total disarmament and promote cooperation in the non-violent use of nuclear energy.
The nations have been meeting at U. N. headquarters in New York since Aug. 1, engaging in a month-long negotiations, adding a final consultation that was postponed for several hours on Friday.
Conference president Gustavo Zlauvinen of Argentina said he is “not in a position to reach an agreement” after Russia challenged the text.
The most recent draft text had expressed “grave concern” about the army’s activities around ukrainian force plants, Zaporizhzhia added, as well as Ukraine’s loss of those sites and the negative effect on security.
The signatories discussed a number of other hot topics from the conference, adding Iran’s nuclear program and North Korea’s nuclear tests.
At the last Review Conference in 2015, the parties also failed to reach agreement on substantive issues. The review convention that was scheduled to take a position in 2020 was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
At the opening of this year’s conference, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that the world faces “a nuclear danger that has not been noticed since the height of the Cold War. “
“Today, humanity is a misunderstanding, a miscalculation of nuclear annihilation,” Guterres said.
Adam Scheinman, the U. S. Special Representative The U. S. Nuclear Nonproliferation Agency noted that the final draft never named Russia and said it underestimated the scenario at the Zaporizhzhia plant.
“Russia is the explanation for why we don’t have a consensus today,” he said. “The last-minute adjustments demanded through Russia were not minor. They were intended for Russia’s apparent goal of wiping Ukraine off the map.
Indonesia, speaking on behalf of the Non-Aligned Movement comprising 120 emerging countries, expressed sadness at the failure and called the final results document “of paramount importance”.
Rebecca Johnson, founding president of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, said she was disappointed with the outcome.
“It’s very disappointing but surprising,” he told Al Jazeera.
“The NPT has long been a failure because it is used primarily through the nuclear-weapon States for their nuclear-weapon validity. Here, it is falling at a time when Russia has introduced an invasion that opposes Ukraine, but has also threatened to use nuclear weapons in which deterrence has obviously failed.