The increasingly close relationship between North Korea and Russia has not only given Pyongyang access to oil and high-tech knowledge, but also a powerful diplomatic partner. With a veto in the UN Security Council, Russia’s UN Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya on Thursday torpedoed the continued existence of the panel of experts tasked with monitoring sanctions against North Korea.
The expert panel was appointed in 2009 to monitor sanctions imposed by the Security Council three years earlier after North Korea’s first successful nuclear test. It restricted the export of certain military and luxury goods to the country. Since then, the sanctions regime against North Korea has been significantly expanded – with Russian support. The panel’s mandate, which expires on April 30, has been extended every year until now, but Russia has now put a stop to that.
Oil deliveries
The panel’s main task is to identify sanctions violations. At the beginning of March, it noted in its latest report that the measures are still being circumvented and that North Korea continues to work on its nuclear weapons program. It also writes that it is investigating indications that the country supplies conventional weapons and ammunition.
Since its war in Ukraine, Russia has strengthened ties with North Korea. According to experts, Pyongyang has been supplying ammunition and ballistic missiles to Russia on a large scale since last summer, which has given new impetus to its war in Ukraine.
Earlier this week the Financial Times based on satellite photos analyzed by the British think tank RUSI, that North Korean tankers are believed to have picked up large quantities of crude oil at a Russian port. When Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov visited Pyongyang in October, he said he had discussed “the supply of energy and other goods that our friends in North Korea need.” A month earlier, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was received at a missile base by his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. Shortly before, Putin had stated on Russian television that there was a prospect of “military-technical cooperation.”
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Unless a compromise is reached in the coming weeks, the panel will cease to exist after April, preventing Russia for the time being from reporting on the warm relations between Moscow and Pyongyang. Russia had used its veto to “gain the freedom to break sanctions in the search for weapons for the fight against Ukraine,” British UN Ambassador Barbara Woodward said after the vote.
China
It was already clear that Russian support for the sanctions regime against North Korea is waning. Lavrov previously said the sanctions had come about “in a completely different geopolitical situation.”
But even according to North Korea’s most important trading partner and military ally China, the sanctions have not led to a solution on the Korean Peninsula. The Chinese UN ambassador, like Russia, advocates easing sanctions and abstained from voting on the panel’s mandate. In May last year, the two countries blocked new measures proposed by the United States, after North Korea launched several long-range missiles in the previous months.
Three former members told the Reuters news agency that the experts’ work had become increasingly difficult due to opposition from Chinese and Russian panel members. For example, China is barely mentioned in a chapter in the latest report on financial sanctions and on the deployment of North Korean workers abroad, even though the People’s Republic plays an important role in this. Tens of thousands of North Koreans are employed in China. Their salaries go to the regime in Pyongyang, which uses them to finance its weapons program. “If you talk about sanctions violations but don’t mention China, that’s not a good representation of what’s going on.”
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