UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Russia vetoed a U.N. resolution Thursday in a move that effectively abolishes the monitoring by United Nations experts of U.N. sanctions against North Korea aimed at reining in its nuclear program, though the sanctions themselves remain in place.
Pretty momentous occasion as far as UNSC affairs go. This is the infamous March resolution that has been renewing the sanctions supervisory regime that was first implemented in 2014 and renewed every spring since. This year’s would have been the 10 year anniversary of it and having it squashed by Russia and abstained by China is a positive step towards drawing back from a long cooperation with the West on this matter and a necessary preliminary move to re-legitimize any re-establishment of economic relations with the DPRK.
So the sanctions are still there but not being monitored so in effect they might as well not even have said sanctions?
The sanctions are still there and the US will never allow them to be lifted, but this is just yet another step along the way to making said sanctions effectively meaningless. Russia has been trading extensively with the DPRK again for a while now and while they are careful to not outright violate UN imposed sanctions which are binding according to international law, they have pretty much managed to find alternative ways of doing the same thing just without strictly speaking going against the letter of the sanctions. And since Russia will not allow the US to strongarm the UN into imposing any additional sanctions to shut the alternatives down, these sorts of loopholes are just going to get bigger and more numerous until the existing sanctions are all but irrelevant.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Russia’s vote sparked Western accusations that Moscow was acting to shield its weapons purchases from North Korea for use in its war against Ukraine, which violate U.N. sanctions.
Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia told the council before the vote that Western nations are trying to “strangle” North Korea and that sanctions are losing their “relevance” and “detached from reality” in preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the country.
He accused the panel of experts of “increasingly being reduced to playing into the hands of Western approaches, reprinting biased information and analyzing newspaper headlines and poor quality photos.” Therefore, he said, it is “essentially conceding its inability to come up with sober assessments of the status of the sanctions regime.”
He warned that Russia’s veto will embolden North Korea to continue jeopardizing global security through development “of long-range ballistic missiles and sanctions evasion efforts.”
“The international community should resolutely uphold the global nonproliferation regime and support the people of Ukraine as they defend their freedom and independence against Russia’s brutal aggression,” Kirby told reporters.
The Security Council established a committee to monitor sanctions and the mandate for its panel of experts to investigate violations had been renewed for 14 years until Thursday.
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