Medvedev says Japan’s prime minister should gut himself

Jan 14 (Reuters) – Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Saturday accused Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of shameful submission to the United States and suggested he ritually disembowel himself.

It was the latest in a long line of shocking and provocative statements from Medvedev, who was once seen as a Western-leaning reformer but has reinvented himself as an arch-hawk since Russia invaded Ukraine l ‘last year.

Speaking at a news conference in Washington on Saturday, the day after a summit with US President Joe Biden on Friday, Kishida made no mention of Medvedev’s comment and was not asked about it.

Japanese officials traveling with Kishida did not immediately respond to requests for comment and in Japan, no one was immediately available to comment on the remarks at the Prime Minister’s official residence or the Foreign Ministry outside normal working hours. .

Medvedev is a top ally of President Vladimir Putin, who serves as deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council and a body overseeing the defense industry.

He was responding to a Friday meeting between Kishida and Biden, at the end of which the two leaders issued a joint statement saying, “We unequivocally declare that any use of a nuclear weapon by Russia in Ukraine would be an act of hostility against humanity and unjustifiable in any case.”

On Saturday, Kishida said the G7 summit of major industrialized nations in Hiroshima in May should demonstrate a firm resolve to maintain international order and the rule of law after Russia invaded Ukraine.

Medvedev said the nuclear declaration showed “paranoia” towards Russia and “betrayed the memory of hundreds of thousands of Japanese people who were burned in the nuclear fires of Hiroshima and Nagasaki” – a reference to the atomic bombs that the states the United States dropped on Japan to force its surrender at the end of World War II.

Rather than demanding repentance from the United States for this, Kishida had shown that he was “just a service attendant for the Americans”.

He said such shame could only be washed away by committing seppuku – a form of suicide by disembowelling, also known as hara-kiri – at a Japanese cabinet meeting after Kishida’s return.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Medvedev has repeatedly warned that Western interference in the crisis could lead to nuclear war, and called Ukrainians “cockroaches” in language that Kyiv openly calls genocidal.

Putin said the risk of nuclear war was growing, but insisted Russia had not “gone crazy” and viewed its own nuclear arsenal as a purely defensive deterrent.

Reuters Editing reporting by Frances Kerry and Diane Craft

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