Comments multiply on the breakthrough in the relations between Moscow and Pyongyang which was reached at the August 24, 2011 summit and appears to be followed by deepening the cooperation between Russia and the DPRK in various spheres. The Ulan-Ude meeting highlighted the commitment of the leaders of both countries to the search for a solution of the nuclear problem hanging over the Korean Peninsula, and at the moment the summit partners must be credited with considerable success. Kim Jong-il confirmed that North Korea is ready to return to the six-party talks and, moreover, hopes they would commence without delay and involve no preconditions of any kind. Another key result produced by the summit is the Moscow-Pyongyang agreement to give a boost to the construction of a gas pipeline linking Russia and South Korea via North Korea.
Oddly enough, the reaction of some of Russia's and Pyongyang's six-party talks partners to the warming of the relations between Russia and the DPRK was far from positive. One gets an impression that the agreement to launch in 2012 joint Russia- North Korea naval exercises focused on search and rescue operations was the only component of the massive package of the recently sealed bilateral agreements to draw the attention of the watchers. The agreement was signed by chief of Russia's Eastern military district command Adm. K. Sidenko when a Russian armed forces delegation visited Pyongyang last August. It seems to evade Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul that the objective which had topped the lists of priorities of the remaining five six-party talks partners since Pyongyang opted out of the process – to bring North Korea to the negotiations table – was accomplished by the Russian diplomacy, and that now is an opportune moment for the above three capitals to contribute to the recovery.
Instead, the US Department of State expressed concern over Russia's contacts with North Korea in military affairs, stressing that they should not obscure the message sent by the international community to Pyongyang that its military programs are a problem and that it should get back to the six-party talks.
Policy analysts went even further and interpreted Moscow's openness to joint semi-military exercises with North Korea as a step towards a new Cold War in North East Asia or an attempt to neutralize the influence of the US, ROK, and Japan on the Korean Peninsula.
The comments abound with outdated and long-useless preconditions that North Korea is supposed to meet to prove own intentions seriousness to return the negotiating process, even though Pyongyang brushed them off with utmost clarity quite some time ago. During the inter-Korean foreign-ministry level consultations held in Beijing on September 21, 2011, the ROK's representatives failed to move beyond the politically bankrupt approach based on preconditions for reanimating the talks, and no progress towards reopening them was achieved.
It seems that Western analysts deliberately ignore the fact that the planned Russia - North Korea naval exercises are a small scale effort of purely humanitarian nature with no armaments involved, while the armed forces of the US and S. Korea exercise jointly on a continuous basis, in many cases in direct proximity of N. Korea's borders, and with tens of thousands of servicemen using massive arsenals which include artillery and missiles firing. It’s highly difficult to understand the logic by which the former case is a threat to stability across the Korean Peninsula, and the latter – the markedly militant games of much greater proportions played by the US and S. Korea which culminated in inter-Korean clashes last year – is a contribution to stability.
It is also deplorable that certain circles in Japan and South Korea are ready to add to their grievances list even the gas pipeline construction plan discussed in Ulan-Ude. It is totally unfair and paradoxically to criticize the project clearly aimed at strengthening multilateral economic cooperation as one somehow undermining it.
A question about the West's actual priorities arises naturally in the course of analyzing its response to the results of the Ulan-Ude summit which are by all means positive from the standpoint of resolving the Korean nuclear problem. The traditional axiom is that engagement and dialog support are the optimal strategy if non-proliferation is at the core of the agenda, but attempts at isolating the opponent, pressure, and quest for dominance make the right choice if regime change is the end goal.
The West's reaction to the easily readable Ulan-Ude signal that reviving the six-party talks is becoming a possibility shows that its stated commitment to the goal and actual intentions are worlds apart, and that the hidden agenda built around regime change in N. Korea is still in place. If this is the case, any initiatives helping N. Korea – for example, those which draw it into negotiations or multilateral economic projects – are going to meet with resentment in the West.
Time will show how long the unrealistic expectations of a collapse in N. Korea and groundless hopes that the country is inherently unstable will be casting a shadow over the inter-Korean settlement. Chances are the time for an imminent strategy upgrade will come fairly soon, considering the US and South Korean expert communities' increasing skepticism over their governments' positions.
This year Russia, like China in the recent past, confirmed in practice its opposition to the isolation of the DPRK and to excessively broad interpretations of the UN Security Council's resolutions which authorize sanctions against the country to reign in its nuclear and missile programs. The view held in Russia is that, whatever the circumstances, sanctions should not hurt the civilian sector of the economy. This view, combined with Russia's own national interests aimed at integration into East Asia regional cooperation process, led Moscow to decisively reach out for North Korea…
Alexander Vorontsov is the Director of the Korea and Mongolia Department of the Institute for Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Science
