UN peace appeal fails to

PEACE talks yesterday between the UN's Secretary General and Vladimir Putin in Russia failed after Moscow warned there is now a real risk of a Third World War.

- Mark Reynolds

Antonio Guterres undertook frank negotiations with the president hours after Kremlin Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov threatened that there was a “considerable" risk of the Ukraine conflict globally escalating to nuclear weapons.

Lavrov accused Nato forces of "pouring oil on the fire” by providing weapons, as he said it was engaging in a proxy war with Russia by arming Kyiv.

US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin said: “Nobody wants a nuclear war, no one can win that.” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba claimed Lavrov's incendiary comments had simply been an attempt to "scare the world off supporting Ukraine”.

And Britain's Armed Forces minister James Heappey stressed that it was not Nato as an organisation donating arms to Ukraine.

He added: “Sergey Lavrov might also reflect that the reason there is a war in Ukraine right now is because Russia rolled over the borders of a sovereign country and started to invade their territory.” Earlier, Lavrov was asked about the importance of avoiding wider bloodshed and whether the conflict was comparable to the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 when the US and the Soviet Union stood on the brink of nuclear war.