In a U.N. Security Council vote on March 28, Russia vetoed an extension of the panel’s work, which it had previously supported. China abstained, and 13 other members voted for it. As a result, the panel that monitored the sanctions against North Korea is to expire at the end of this month, and the rest of the world will know even less than it does now about North Korea’s quest.
This was a gift from Russian President Vladimir Putin to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, undermining sanctions that the United Nations has imposed in recent years. More than that, it suggests yet another setback — again, perpetrated by Russia — to the post-Cold War struggle to curtail the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
Mr. Putin is paying back North Korea for sending an estimated 10,000 containers of weapons and ammunition to Russia for use in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, filling three major storage depots near the front lines of the war, amounting to more than 3 million rounds. South Korea’s defense minister has said North Korea’s weapons factories are working around-the-clock to manufacture artillery shells for Russia. North Korean ballistic missiles have been fired by Russia at Ukrainian cities. The Financial Times, examining satellite photographs, reported that Russian vessels are delivering oil to North Korea in defiance of the sanctions, including at least five tankers in March, the first since the United Nations imposed a strict cap on oil transfers in 2017. Mr. Putin’s foreign intelligence chief, Sergei Naryshkin, visited Pyongyang March 25 through 27 in a bid to deepen cooperation, his agency announced. A visit by Mr. Putin is expected this year.
Six U.S. presidents have tried to restrain North Korea’s nuclear and missile program, largely without success. After the failed Hanoi summit with President Donald Trump in 2019, Mr. Kim appears to have given up any hope of normalization with the United States, accelerating the pace of his armament effort while deepening ties with Moscow.
Russia has thrown him a lifeline. But what if he wants more than just oil and a helpful veto at the United Nations? There is a worrisome possibility that he could seek assistance with nuclear weapons and missile technology from Russia. The director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, warned Congress recently that Russia’s needs could undermine “long-held nonproliferation norms.” Siegfried Hecker, the former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, has argued that Mr. Putin is breaking down the global nuclear order that existed for more than 70 years, including the concerted efforts (which Russia once supported) to control the spread of nuclear weapons. He has pointed out that North Korea might seek from Russia nuclear weapons test results. The Soviet Union conducted 715 nuclear tests, and North Korea has carried out only six. Even more unsettling, North Korea might ask Russia for information about missile or warhead designs or — most worrisome — fissile material for fueling warheads.
China is North Korea’s major trading partner, and although it voted for some U.N. Security Council sanctions, its banks have been complicit in violating them. Pressing China hard to restrain North Korea seems unlikely to succeed now, given all the other tensions between the United States and China. It is not yet certain how China will view Russia’s new coziness with Mr. Kim. But it is certain that Mr. Kim’s boisterous demonstration of his missiles will continue to unsettle U.S. allies Japan and South Korea. On Tuesday, Mr. Kim attended the launch of a new intermediate-range ballistic missile purportedly with a hypersonic glide vehicle. He has also announced that North Korea will switch to solid-fuel missiles, which are faster to launch.
The loss of the monitoring panel can be repaired, perhaps by establishing a new one supported by the Group of Seven. But the larger challenge is to come up with a new and effective strategy to deal with North Korea. U.S. policy has wavered between drift, incentives, Mr. Trump’s failed summitry and back to drift. As always in the atomic age, the danger is of disastrous miscalculation and misperception in a confrontation. Containing the danger is now even harder, as Mr. Putin — with a permanent Security Council seat — transforms Russia from a global actor that exercised at least a basic level of responsibility on some issues into a rogue state that makes common cause with the world’s worst regimes.
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