U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson Accuses Russia of Undermining the North Korean Sanction

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson Accuses Russia of Undermining the North Korean Sanction

By E. Stanley Ukeni

In an interesting development, the United States Secretary of States, Rex Tillerson, on Wednesday, 17^th of January 2018, accused the Russian Federation of deliberately undermining parts of the United Nations’ sanctions on North Korea, which was imposed on the rouge regime over its nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles programs.

“It’s apparent to us that they’re not implementing all the sanctions and there’s some evidence they may be frustrating some of the sanctions,” Secretary Tillerson told reporters aboard his aircraft while returning from a meeting on North Korea, which was held in Vancouver, Canada.

He noted that the Russians are particularly failing to comply with strict U.N. measures pertaining to the supply of refined petroleum products to the North Koreans. He also suggested that Moscow seem to be tacitly skating other parts of the sanctions regime— without elaborating.

I am pretty sure that the US Secretary of State was under no illusion that some countries would try to skate the sanctions regime, but he wanted to call out the violators—to expose their hypocrisy. He probably wanted Kremlin to know that Washington was unto their shenanigans.  

My thought on this is, ‘how is this surprising to anyone?’ It was never truly in the medium to long-term  strategic interest of Russia to cripple the North Korean regime. The undeclared rule of Statecraft demands that Nation States would, by necessity, seek to advance their narrow strategic interests above the collective good.  

Any keen observer of global geopolitics would know that neither Russia nor China—irrespective of who seats at the helm of affairs in these countries, will ever view a Korean peninsula under American axis to be in its medium to long term strategic interest.

Make no mistake about it, many of the countries that voted for sanctions against North Korea, at the U.N. Security Council, considers the sanction regime to be a charade—and not designed to actually be effective at crippling the Regime of Kim Jong Un. They merely supported the vote for sanction in order to placate the United States.

Having said this, I feel that the recently passed U.N. sanctions against North Korea is a major diplomatic victory for those seeking to deescalate the tensions between Washington and Pyongyang—with hopes of finding a negotiated solution to the crisis.   

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