Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Saturday accused Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of shameful subservience to the United States and suggested that he commit suicide, evoking an ancient ritual of Japanese warriors.
The words were said after Kishida met, on Friday (13), with the American president, Joe Biden, in Washington. At the time, the two leaders issued a joint statement condemning possible use of nuclear weapons by Russia in the Ukraine War. The document also emphasizes that the practice is unjustifiable and would represent an act of “hostility against humanity”.
Medvedev said the statement showed paranoia towards Russia and “betrayed the memory of hundreds of thousands of Japanese who were burned in the nuclear fire of Hiroshima and Nagasaki”. He was referring to the atomic bombs that the US dropped on Japan to force its surrender at the end of World War II and which destroyed both cities and caused the death of more than 200,000 people, considering those who were exposed to radiation over the years. months.
According to the former Russian president, instead of demanding apologies from the US for the attacks, Kishida showed that he is “just a service attendant for the Americans”. Medvedev also added that to redeem himself, the Japanese premier should kill himself at a cabinet meeting.
By suggesting death, the Russian evoked harakiri, an ancient Japanese ritual. The tradition consisted of a ceremony performed for the suicide of a disgraced warrior. On that occasion, the warrior killed himself by piercing his own abdomen with a sword.
Reuters news agency reached out to Japanese officials for comment on the Russian’s statement, but the country’s foreign ministry did not respond to requests.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, Medvedev has made a series of provocative statements to Western leaders. At the end of September, for example, he threatened the use of nuclear weapons if NATO (the western military alliance) helped Ukraine to attack the four annexed regions in the neighboring country.
“Let’s imagine that Russia is forced to use the most frightening weapon against the Ukrainian regime, which has committed large-scale acts of aggression that are dangerous to the very existence of our state,” he said. “I believe that NATO will not directly interfere in the conflict even in this scenario. The demagogues across the ocean and in Europe will not die in a nuclear apocalypse,” he added.
On another front, the former Russian president recently called Ukrainians cockroaches, in what Kiev called an “openly genocidal” statement.
Interestingly, when he was in power, Medvedev was seen as a Western-leaning political reformer. When president, he even spoke on several occasions with his American counterpart, Barack Obama. In one of the meetings, in 2012, the democrat called the Russian “my friend” and said that he could not have wished for a better partner than Medvedev to develop better relations with Russia.
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