Japanese PM should disembowel himself, says former Russian president

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev slammed Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida for the latter's "subservience" to the United States and said that he should "disembowel himself."

The provocative statement comes after Kishida's meeting with US President Joe Biden, wherein the two sides made it clear that Russia's use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine will be considered a crime against humanity.

"We state unequivocally that any use of a nuclear weapon by Russia in Ukraine would be an act of hostility against humanity and unjustifiable in any way," read a joint statement from the two leaders.

The statement clearly did not go down well with Medvedev, who has become a war hawk since the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year.

He said that 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 went on to call Kishida a "service attendant for the Americans." In a Telegram post, he said that the statement by the US and Japan amounted to "paranoia." And that the only way to cleanse oneself of "such shame" is to commit ritualistic suicide by disembowelment.

The Japanese officials have not yet responded to Medvedev's comments, according to a report in The Independent.

He served as Russia's president from 2008 to 2012. He is currently the deputy head of Putin's advisory security council. Since the beginning of the war, he has warned that Western interference in the crisis could lead to nuclear war.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has also said that the threat of a nuclear war is rising and added that Russia has not "gone mad" and would not use its nuclear weapons first.

"Such a threat is growing, it would be wrong to hide it. We have not gone mad, we are aware of what nuclear weapons are. We are not about to run around the world brandishing this weapon like a razor," he said last month.