The new partnership treaty between North Korea and Russia indicates their strong intent to resist the international sanctions in place against Pyongyang over its nuclear and weapons programs.
The North’s Korean Central News Agency released the Korean-language full text of the “comprehensive strategic partnership treaty” that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and Russian President Vladimir Putin signed Wednesday after their talks in Pyongyang.
It has a clause about expressing opposition to “unilateral coercive measures of an extraterritorial nature.” Article 16 also says that the two states “consider the implementation of such measures to be illegal and acts that violate the U.N. Charter and international norms.”
The treaty stipulates that the two sides will “coordinate and cooperate to support multilateral initiatives that will exclude the international practice of applying” these measures.
Those measures appear to mean the U.S. sanctions and the independent sanctions imposed on North Korea by the United St
ates and its allies and partners, like South Korea, Japan and Australia, outside of the U.N. Security Council (UNSC) sanctions regime.
The imposition of independent anti-Pyongyang sanctions has gained more traction amid a weakening of the UNSC sanctions regime on North Korea in recent years, due mainly to the passive attitudes of China and Russia.
In late March, Russia vetoed the annual renewal of the U.N. panel monitoring the implementation of North Korean sanctions, a move that was highly criticized by the West.
In the news conference following the summit with Kim, Putin blasted the sanctions regime as “sanctions strangulation by the West” and claimed that the UNSC sanctions regime against the North should be revised.
Putin’s visit to the North marks an “impetus for creating mechanisms to reduce the impact of sanctions on bilateral relations,” the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, was quoted as saying by Sputnik.
The treaty also says that neither of the two countries should join any action that woul
d “infringe upon the core interests of one of them” and that they commit to addressing issues that might pose a “direct or indirect challenge to their shared interests and safety.”
The treaty has also specified science and technology, space, peaceful use of nuclear power and artificial intelligence as among the areas for cooperation.
This can be seen as risking the possibility of flouting the U.N. sanctions, as North Korea is banned from using any technology that may be diverted for its development of weapons of mass destruction under the Resolution 2321 of the UNSC sanctions, adopted in 2016.
The new treaty is expected to spur momentum for expanded cooperation between the two states, not only in the military and technological sense, but also in terms of trade and infrastructure, which will help the isolated North improve its economy long crippled by the sanctions.
Article 10 states that “conditions will be created” for cooperation in areas like customs and finance as they work to increase trade volumes.
T
he treaty also mentions “working to build ‘direct linkages’ for regional developments,” suggesting Russia’s commitment to providing support for transport and other infrastructure construction in North Korea.
Source: Yonhap News Agency
