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

SEOUL: Russia confronted a mounting backlash on Friday (Mar 29) after utilizing its veto energy to successfully finish official UN monitoring of sanctions on North Korea amid a probe into alleged arms transfers between Moscow and Pyongyang.

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

South Korea’s overseas ministry on Friday slammed the transfer as an “irresponsible determination”.

Seoul has accused Pyongyang of sending thousands of containers of weapons to Moscow to be used in Ukraine, and Russia’s transfer was “virtually akin to destroying a CCTV to keep away from being caught red-handed”, stated Hwang Joon-kook, South Korea’s UN ambassador.

The European Union stated Moscow’s veto was “an effort to hide illegal arms transfers between DPRK and Russia, within the context of the latter’s unlawful conflict of aggression towards Ukraine”, referring to the North by its official identify.

The US, in the meantime, known as the vote a “self-interested effort to bury the panel’s reporting by itself collusion” with North Korea.

“Russia’s actions as we speak have cynically undermined worldwide peace and safety, all to advance the corrupt discount that Moscow has struck with the DPRK,” State Division spokesman Matthew Miller stated after the Thursday vote.

The panel’s mandate expires on the finish of April.

North Korea has been underneath mounting sanctions since 2006, put in place by the UN Safety Council in response to its nuclear program.

Since 2019, Russia and China have tried to influence the Safety Council to ease the sanctions, which don’t have any expiration date.

The council has lengthy been divided on the problem.