UNITED NATIONS (Archyde.com) – China and Russia vetoed a US-led effort on Thursday to impose more UN sanctions on North Korea over its resumption of ballistic missile launches, leading to the first public split in the UN Security Council since it began punishing Pyongyang in 2006.
All 13 of the council’s remaining 13 members voted in favor of the Washington-drafted resolution proposing a ban on oil and tobacco exports to North Korea, whose leader Kim Jong Un is a smoker. The resolution also sought to blacklist the Lazarus hacking group, a group the United States says is linked to North Korea.
The vote came a day after Pyongyang launched three missiles, one of which is believed to be the largest intercontinental ballistic missile, following US President Joe Biden’s Asian tour. It was the latest in a series of ballistic missile launches this year that have been banned by the Security Council.
US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas Greenfield called the vote a “disappointing day” for the council.
“The world faces a clear and present danger from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea),” she told the council. The Council’s restraint and silence did not end the threat or even reduce it. They may even have encouraged the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”
She said Washington’s assessment is that Pyongyang has carried out six launches of ICBMs this year and is “actively preparing to conduct a nuclear test.”
Over the past sixteen years, the Security Council has steadily and unanimously escalated sanctions on Pyongyang to cut funding for its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. The last time it tightened sanctions was in 2017.
Since then, China and Russia have been pushing for sanctions relief on humanitarian grounds. They have postponed some actions behind closed doors in the Security Council’s North Korea sanctions committee, but Thursday’s vote marks the first time they have publicly broken consensus.
“The imposition of new sanctions against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a path that leads to a dead end,” Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia, told the council.
“We emphasized the ineffectiveness and cruelty resulting from the intensification of the sanctions pressure on Pyongyang,” he added.
China’s UN envoy Zhang Jun said additional sanctions on North Korea would not help and would only lead to more “negative effects and an escalation of confrontation.”
He informed the council that “the situation on the peninsula has developed to what it is today due to fluctuations in US policy and the failure to maintain the results of previous dialogues.”
The United Nations General Assembly will discuss North Korea over the next two weeks under a new rule that obliges the 193-nation assembly to meet each time one of the permanent members of the Security Council, Russia, China, the United States, France and Britain, uses its veto.