There is a danger of Ukraine acquiring nuclear weapons: Russia’s Lavrov

Russia’s foreign minister told a Geneva disarmament meeting on Tuesday that Kiev has been seeking to acquire nuclear weapons, calling this a real danger that it needed to prevent.

“Ukraine still has Soviet technologies and the means of delivery of such weapons,” Sergei Lavov told the Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament in a pre-recorded address. “We cannot fail to respond to this real danger,” he said.

At the same meeting, Ukraine’s foreign minister accused Russia of war crimes through its shelling of his country and called for a special meeting to address Russian aggression and weapons of mass destruction.

Russian state-owned news agency

Ruptly, a Russian state-owned news agency based in Berlin, is facing a staff exodus after President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine that is part of a broader contraction of Russia’s global news empire.

Employees complained about an all-staff call that they were being prevented from describing the invasion as such, amongst other editorial objections, according to a recording of the call heard by Reuters. Russia says its military deployment in Ukraine is a “special operation” and has cautioned local media to use that terminology.

Chief Content Officer Ekaterina Mavrenkova urged staff not to get hung up on precise wordings.

“All the words we’ve been using, they do not distort the reality in any way,” she said in the recording heard by Reuters. “With all these linguistic subtleties, there are ways to objectively present the picture without falling with whatever side.”

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