On July 20 Russia accused Ukraine of firing two drones at Zaporizhzhia, which is also the largest nuclear plant in Europe, but said the reactor was undamaged.

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At a UN Security Council meeting on Ukraine on Friday, Russia’s deputy UN Ambassador Dmitry Polyanskiy accused his Western counterparts of “deliberately” ignoring the July 20 attack and use of “explosive-laden drones of foreign manufacture to attack the plant”.

Ukraine’s state nuclear company Energoatom did not comment on the purported drone impact.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s atomic watchdog, should be given access to the plant, Blinken said.

“While this war rages on, inaction is unconscionable,” IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi said on Twitter. “If an accident occurs at #Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant in #Ukraine we will not have a natural disaster to blame. We will have only ourselves to answer to.”

The United Nations chief warned the world on Monday that “humanity is just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation,” citing the war in Ukraine, nuclear threats in Asia and the Middle East and many other factors.

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres gave the dire warning at the opening of the long-delayed high-level meeting to review the landmark 50-year-old treaty aimed at preventing the spread of nuclear weapons and eventually achieving a nuclear-free world.

The danger of increasing nuclear threats and a nuclear catastrophe was also raised by the United States, Japan, Germany, the UN nuclear chief and many other opening speakers at the meeting to review progress and agree to future steps to implement the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, known as the NPT.

Blinken said North Korea is preparing to conduct its seventh nuclear test, Iran “has either been unwilling or unable” to accept a deal to return to the 2015 nuclear agreement aimed at reining in its nuclear program, and Russia is “engaged in reckless, dangerous nuclear saber-rattling” in Ukraine.

He cited Russian President Vladimir Putin’s warning after its February 24 invasion that any attempt to interfere would lead to “consequences you have never seen,” emphasising that his country is “one of the most potent nuclear powers.”

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This is contrary to assurances given to Ukraine of its sovereignty and independence when it gave up its Soviet-era nuclear weapons in 1994, Blinken said, and sends “the worst possible message” to any country thinking it needs nuclear weapons to defend itself and deter aggression.

Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said divisions in the world since the last review conference in 2015, which ended without a consensus document, have become greater, stressing that Russia’s threat to use nuclear weapons in the Ukraine war has contributed “to worldwide concern that yet another catastrophe by nuclear weapon use is a real possibility”.

Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock accused Russia of “brutally violating the assurances” it gave Ukraine in 1994 and said Moscow’s “reckless nuclear rhetoric” since its invasion of its smaller neighbour “is putting at risk everything the NPT has achieved in five decades.”