North Korea could send workers to two Russian-controlled territories in eastern Ukraine, Russian Ambassador to North Korea Alexander Matsegora said — a move that would pose a challenge to international sanctions against the North’s nuclear weapons program.
NK News, a Seoul-based Web site, reported that Matsegora said North Korean workers could help rebuild the war-shattered infrastructure in the self-proclaimed people’s republics in Donetsk and Luhansk.
Matsegora said there were potentially “a lot of opportunities” for economic cooperation between the North and the self-proclaimed republics in Ukraine’s Donbas region, despite UN sanctions.
Photo: Reuters
NK News said he told the Russian newspaper Izvestia in an interview that “highly qualified and hard-working Korean builders, who are capable of working in the most difficult conditions, could help us restore our social, infrastructure and industrial facilities.”
His comments come days after North Korea became one of only a few countries to recognize the two territories, accusing the Ukrainian government of being part of Washington’s “hostile” stance toward Pyongyang.
“Ukraine has no the right to raise issue or dispute our legitimate exercise of sovereignty after committing an act that severely lacks fairness and justice between nations by actively joining the US unjust and illegal hostile policy in the past,” the North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.
In response, a furious Ukraine cut diplomatic ties with North Korea and accused it of undermining Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba said Russia’s appeal to North Korea for support showed that Moscow had “no more allies in the world, except for countries that depend on it financially and politically.”
Ukraine had already suspended its political and economic contact with North Korea as part of UN-led sanctions aimed at pressuring Pyongyang to dismantle its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
North Korea has traditionally earned much-needed foreign currency by sending its citizens to work overseas. Under UN-sanctions they were supposed to have been repatriated by the end of 2019, but significant numbers of North Korean laborers have reportedly continued to work in Russia and China, as well as in Laos and Vietnam.
Matsegora left open the possibility for another showdown with the UN over sanctions after he said that North Korean factories and power stations built during the Soviet era could use equipment built in the Donbas region, where Moscow-backed forces have been fighting Ukraine since 2014.
This would contravene a UN ban, imposed in late 2017, on North Korea acquiring industrial machinery, electronic equipment and other items.
Matsegora said that sanctions could frustrate attempts to establish a trade link between the republics and North Korea, but said economic ties were “absolutely justified,” NK News said.
Go Myong-hyun, a research fellow at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul, was quoted by NK News as saying that economic cooperation would confirm that Russia — a permanent member of the UN security council that has imposed sanctions on the North — had become a rogue state.
“Once Russia violates the very sanctions it had authorized, the security council would be critically undermined,” Go said.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘POINT OF NO RETURN’: The Caribbean nation needs increased international funding and support for a multinational force to help police tackle expanding gang violence The top UN official in Haiti on Monday sounded an alarm to the UN Security Council that escalating gang violence is liable to lead the Caribbean nation to “a point of no return.” Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti Maria Isabel Salvador said that “Haiti could face total chaos” without increased funding and support for the operation of the Kenya-led multinational force helping Haiti’s police to tackle the gangs’ expanding violence into areas beyond the capital, Port-Au-Prince. Most recently, gangs seized the city of Mirebalais in central Haiti, and during the attack more than 500 prisoners were freed, she said.
RSS