The other Asian thorn in one's side:
South Korea's top spy agency believes North Korea sent more than a million artillery shells to Russia since August to help fuel Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, according to a lawmaker who attended a closed-door briefing Wednesday with intelligence officials.
North Korea and Russia have been actively boosting the visibility of their partnership in the face of separate, deepening confrontations with the United States. Their diplomacy — highlighted by a summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Putin in September — has triggered concerns about an arms arrangement in which North Korea supplies Russia with badly needed munitions in exchange for advanced Russian technologies that would strengthen Kim’s nuclear-armed military.
Both Pyongyang and Moscow have denied U.S. and South Korean claims that the North has been transferring arms supplies to Russia.
According to lawmaker Yoo Sang-bum, the South Korean National Intelligence Service believes the North shipped more than a million artillery shells to Russia through ships and other transport means since early August to help boost Russia's warfighting capabilities in Ukraine. Those shells would roughly amount to two months' worth of supplies for the Russians, Yoo said.
The agency believes North Korea has been operating its munitions factories at full capacity to meet Russian munition demands and has also been mobilizing residents to increase production, Yoo said. There are also signs that North Korea dispatched weapons experts to Russia in October to counsel Russian officials on how to use the exported North Korean weapons.
Are those pittance sanctions against North Korea and Russia working?
In a small measure, but not enough to stop the above:
North Korea is poised to close as many as a dozen embassies including in Spain, Hong Kong, and multiple countries in Africa, according to media reports and analysts, in a move that could see nearly 25 percent of Pyongyang's missions close worldwide.
North Korea's recent closing of its diplomatic missions was a sign that the reclusive country is struggling to make money overseas because of international sanctions, South Korea's unification ministry said on Tuesday.
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North Korea is increasingly tying its economic and political future to Moscow and Beijing, a high-profile defector said Thursday, amid a spate of embassy closures that may have been sparked by tightened international sanctions against Pyongyang.
North Korea has recently closed embassies in Spain, Angola and Uganda, while a report in Japanese media claims that the isolated regime plans to shutter a dozen more.
"This is the first mass closure of embassies since the 1990s," Thae Yong Ho, who served as the North Korean deputy ambassador to Britain before defecting in 2016, said at a press briefing on Thursday in Seoul. He was elected to South Korea's parliament as a member of the ruling conservative People Power Party in 2020.
North Korea has long used its overseas embassies as fronts for commercial activities and illicit trade, according to the U.N. Security Council.
However, sanctions imposed by the United Nations and individual countries including the United States and South Korea over the North's banned weapons programs are making it harder for the diplomatic missions to make money, Thae said.
"Embassies in countries like Uganda and Angola were financially benefiting North Korea and escaping U.N. sanctions," Thae said. "But with sanctions getting tighter, they are finding it difficult to get a financial return to North Korea."
Instead, Pyongyang is turning its focus toward Moscow and Beijing, the lawmaker said.
"Before, it was more of a non-aligned diplomacy that North Korea was executing, but now it is moving to a China- and Russia-centered diplomacy," Thae said.
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Chinese companies help North Koreans workers — from cheap laborers to well-paid IT specialists — find work abroad. A Beijing art gallery even boasts of North Korean artists working 12-hour days in its heavily surveilled compound, churning out paintings of idyllic visions of life under communism that each sell for thousands of dollars.
That's all part of what international authorities say is a growing mountain of evidence that shows Beijing is helping cash-strapped North Korea evade a broad range of international sanctions designed to hamper Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program, according to an Associated Press review of United Nations reports, court records and interviews with experts.
“It’s overwhelming,” Aaron Arnold, a former member of a U.N. panel on North Korea and a sanctions expert at the Royal United Services Institute, said of the links between China and sanctions evasion. “At this point, it’s very hard to say it’s not intentional.” ...
But in recent years, Beijing has sought to weaken those very sanctions and last year vetoed new restrictions on Pyongyang after it conducted a nuclear test.
This summer a top ruling Chinese party official provided a vivid example of China’s ambiguity on sanctions as he stood clapping next to North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un during a Pyongyang military parade. Rolling past the two men were trucks carrying nuclear-capable missiles and other weapons the regime isn’t supposed to have.
They were joined by Russia’s defense minister, apparently part of a new effort by the Kremlin, struggling in its invasion of Ukraine, to strength ties with North Korea. The U.S. has accused North Korea of supplying artillery shells and rockets to Russia, while new evidence shows Hamas fighters likely fired North Korean weapons during their Oct. 7 assault on Israel.
But while Russia and a handful of other countries have been accused of helping North Korea evade sanctions, none has been as prolific as China, according to court records and international reports.
“China violates North Korea sanctions it voted for and says won’t work because it’s afraid they’ll work. And, also, says it isn’t violating them” said Joshua Stanton, a human rights advocate and attorney who has helped write U.S. sanction laws against North Korea.
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China sits permanently on the UN security council.
A group of North Korean defectors will head from Seoul to New York next week to appeal to the United Nations to stop China from repatriating hundreds of fellow escapees back to their authoritarian homeland.
Last month, human rights groups reported Beijing had forcibly returned about 600 escapees to the North, while Seoul’s unification ministry also confirmed that a “large number” of North Korean citizens had been repatriated after the dictatorship loosened its Covid-19 restrictions.
There are now fears that hundreds more could be deported back to North Korea in the months ahead, after research from activists and the UN’s envoy on human rights, Elizabeth Salmon, indicated there were some 2,000 defectors languishing in Chinese detention centres.
“The repatriated refugees are treated as criminals or traitors by the North Korean authorities,” said Thae Yong-ho, one of North Korea’s highest-level defectors, during a press conference in Seoul.
“Their punishment may include imprisonment without legal process, enforced disappearance, lifelong detention in prison camps and even execution.”
The campaign to stop further repatriations had been born out of the belief that “silent and quiet diplomacy with the Chinese government on this issue could not resolve this humanitarian catastrophe,” added Mr Thae, who now sits in South Korea’s National Assembly.
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