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Russia, China oppose military intervention in North Korea
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov speaks at a news conference after a meeting of the Russia-Arab cooperation forum in Moscow February 20, 2013.
Credit: Reuters/Sergei Karpukhin
MOSCOW |
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia and China said on Friday they would oppose any foreign military intervention in North Korea over its recent nuclear test.
The two countries' foreign ministers condemned last week's test but said any action against North Korea had to be agreed at the United Nations, where Russia and China have the right of veto as permanent members of the Security Council.
"We are against the carrying out of a nuclear test in North Korea," Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told a joint news conference after talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow.
"The U.N. Security Council should give an adequate response ... but the action should be directed towards peace on the Korean peninsula," he said.
Lavrov said China and Russia had agreed that it was "vitally important not to ... allow the situation to be used as a pretext for military intervention."
North Korea's latest test, its third since 2006, prompted warnings from Washington and others that more sanctions would be imposed on the isolated state.
The U.N. Security Council has only just tightened sanctions on Pyongyang after it launched a long-range rocket in December.
The North is banned under U.N. sanctions from developing missile or nuclear technology after its 2006 and 2009 nuclear tests.
(Reporting by Alessandra Prentice, Writing by Thomas Grove, Editing by Timothy Heritage)
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Russia still has a chance to show the people here it is a sincere and honest player. China has already damned itself.
Why are Russia and Communist China always of the same opinion on any subject? Makes no sense, unless you know the ground rules.
Here are the ground rules:
“U.S. policy for dealing with the North Korean situation is inadequate because it focuses on North Korea in isolation as a rogue state, and naively seeks help from the Russians and Chinese to solve the problem. The North Korea situation and any future nuclear incident, wherever it occurs, must be seen against the background of Sino-Soviet ‘convergence’ strategy: the interaction of Russian and Chinese policy and the moves they make to derive strategic gains from critical situations should be closely studied.” – KGB Defector Major Anatoliy Golitsyn, The Perestroika Deception, March 1989, p. 46.
In other words, the “collapse” of the USSR was a strategic ruse, as was the so-called Sino-Soviet Split.
The United States concurs with South Korea that a preemptive strike is necessary to avoid any further nuclear and conventional threats. The only issue to be agreed upon for the facilitating a counter attack is when!
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