German Chancellor Olaf Scholz had an hour-long conversation with Russian President Putin, the first in two years, a German government spokesman has confirmed.

The Financial Times reported that the chancellor’s spokesman Steffen Hebestreit said the leader of the Social Democratic Party “condemned the Russian offensive war against Ukraine and called on President Putin to end it and withdraw his troops”.

The outlet reported that a combative Scholz also stressed his country’s “firm determination” to support Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression “as long as necessary”.

This comes after claims and counterclaims about Ukraines ability and willingness to develop a basic nuclear weapon, similar to the “Fat Man” bomb that the US dropped on Nagasaki in 1945.

A think tank – UkraineThe National Institute for Strategic Studies – which advises the Ukrainian government, produced a report which argued that the production of a rudimentary device would not be challenging.

“Creating a simple atomic bomb, as the United States did in the context of the Manhattan Project, would not be a difficult task 80 years later,” said the report, authored by Oleksii Yizhak.

However, the bomb that Ukrainian scientists were able to create would pack about a tenth of the punch of the Fat Man explosive, the report added.

Still, that power “would be enough to destroy an entire Russian airbase or concentrated military, industrial or logistics facilities. The exact nuclear yield would be unpredictable because it would use different isotopes of plutonium”.

But today Heorhii Tykhyi, a spokesman for Ukraine’s foreign ministry, dismissed any suggestion that President Zelensky was considering developing a nuclear weapon.

“We do not possess, develop or intend to acquire nuclear weapons,” he was quoted as saying The sun.

“Ukraine cooperates closely with the IAEA and is completely transparent about its monitoring, which excludes the use of nuclear material for military purposes.”