Russia faces backlash as veto ends UN’s N. Korea sanctions monitoring

Russia faced a mounting backlash yesterday after using its veto power to effectively end official UN monitoring of sanctions on North Korea amid a probe into alleged arms transfers between Moscow and Pyongyang.

Russia’s UN Security Council veto on Thursday blocked the renewal of the panel of experts tasked with investigating violations of sanctions tied to North Korea’s banned nuclear and ballistic missile programmes.

South Korea’s foreign ministry yesterday slammed the move as an “irresponsible decision”.

Seoul has accused Pyongyang of sending thousands of containers of weapons to Moscow for use in Ukraine, and Russia’s move was “almost comparable to destroying a CCTV to avoid being caught red-handed”, said Hwang Joonkook, South Korea’s UN ambassador.

The Kremlin defended its veto yesterday, saying UN sanctions on North Korea were hindering dialogue and peace on the Korean peninsula and had not aided regional security.

“Over the years, international restrictive measures have not helped to improve the security situation in the region,” foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters at a daily briefing that Moscow’s position was “more in line with our interests”.

The European Union had earlier called Moscow’s veto “an effort to conceal unlawful arms transfers between DPRK and Russia, in the context of the latter’s illegal war of aggression against Ukraine”, referring to the North by its official name.

The US, meanwhile, said the vote was a “self-interested effort to bury the panel’s reporting on its own collusion” with North Korea. (AFP)