内容摘要：The United States and Japan have also condemned the deepening military ties between North Korea and Russia.

The United States and Japan have also condemned the deepening military ties between North Korea and Russia.

The timeline of email exchanges between Doctor Upton and superiors investigating incidents involving Sandie Peggie featured heavily in the evidence session.Ms Peggie's legal team asked Dr Upton why a report sent to senior staff at the hospital titled "hate incident" had not mentioned previous incidents.

Dr Upton said this was because investigating staff had only asked for details of the Christmas Eve argument in the changing rooms.Ms Cunningham said the incident in the resuscitation room would be "the most important" aspect to complain about, and questioned why it had taken until after the Christmas Eve confrontation for it to be reported.She said: "The reason for the delay in sending the email entitled hate incident is that you were urgently taking advice from the BMA about one or two things.

"Those things were the regulatory risk for you in raising such a serious professional complaint for the first time only months after the incident, and possibly also the regulatory and disciplinary risk for you in making up a potentially career ending allegation about a colleague that had no substance or foundation?"Dr Upton replied: "No, that's not why it took so long. I'm not in the business of making false allegations about a colleague."

The doctor added: "At the time I was thinking of it purely as a communication issue. Now I would consider it a patient safety issue. If it was I should have raised it sooner."

Dr Upton later contacted the British Medical Association and line managers at the hospital regarding the Christmas Eve incident.“Even if we got involved in the war this would be a path to escalation. Why? Because you, the Anglo-Saxons, would immediately say that another country had got involved on one side... so Nato troops would be deployed to Ukraine.”

I ask him whether Vladimir Putin has ever asked Lukashenko to provide Belarussian troops for the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine.“Never. Neither he, nor [former Defence Minister] Sergei Shoigu, nor the current Defence Minister Andrei Belousov has ever raised that question.”

But Belarus has played a part in Russia’s war. In February 2022 Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was launched, partly, from Belarusian territory. Why did the country’s leader allow the Kremlin to do that?“How do you know I gave permission for Belarusian territory to be used?” Lukashenko asks me.