Nuclear war fears -a Western creation: Lavrov

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday he did not believe the conflict in Ukraine would spiral into a nuclear war.   

Asked by a Kremlin correspondent for Russia’s Kommersant newspaper if he thought a nuclear war could be triggered, Lavrov told reporters in Turkey: “I don’t want to believe it, and I do not believe it.”   

Lavrov, President Vladimir Putin’s Foreign Minister since 2004, said the nuclear theme had been thrown into discussions only by the West, which he said kept on returning to nuclear war like Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis.   

“Of course it gives us cause for concern when the West, like Freud, keeps on returning and returning to this topic,” Lavrov said after talks in Antalya, Turkey, with his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba.   

Lavrov said talk of a potential Russian attack against the former Soviet Baltic states - Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, now all members of the European Union and NATO - “appear to be old hoaxes”.   

Russia and the United States have by the biggest arsenals of nuclear warheads after the Cold War that divided the world for much of the 20th century, pitting the West against the Soviet Union and its allies.   
LONDON, March 10 (Reuters) -