Russia 090423 Basic Political Developments

Russian FM seeks to mediate Korean nuclear issue

http://www.russiatoday.ru/Politics/2009-04-23/Russian_FM_seeks_to_mediate_Korean_nuclear_issue.html

23 April, 2009, 09:30

The future of the six-way talks on the nuclear problem of the Korean peninsula is expected to dominate the Russian-Korean talks. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is now in Pyongyang on a two-day official visit.

Lavrov is expected to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, and also hold talks with his counterpart Pak Ui-chung, and parliament speaker Kim Yong Nam.

The sides will discuss the North Korea’s intention to withdraw from the six-party talks after the United Nations Security Council condemned the country for a powerful rocket launch on April 5.

On April 13, the Security Council unanimously condemned the launch. The compromise statement – drafted by the United States, China, Russia, Britain, France, and Japan – did not contain a call for sanctions which the U.S. originally suggested.

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North Korea responded to the condemnation saying it will boycott the six-party UN talks on its nuclear program, and will restart its nuclear power plant.

Russia has repeatedly called on North Korea to get back to the negotiating table. At the same time, the Russian foreign minister has repeatedly spoken against tougher sanctions against Pyongyang.

“A threat of sanctions to North Korea is counterproductive,” Sergey Lavrov said.

Lavrov Visits North Korea in Effort to Revive Nuclear Talks

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aY_byHfOz2Uc

By Michael Heath

April 23 (Bloomberg) -- Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov arrived in North Korea today for talks with government officials after the regime vowed to pull out of nuclear disarmament negotiations.

The visit comes after Kim Jong Il’s government declared April 14 it was quitting the six-party talks and expelled United Nations inspectors in retaliation for Security Council condemnation of its suspected ballistic missile test.

Lavrov will discuss “the situation on the Korean Peninsula and the northeast Asia region and international issues of mutual interest,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement earlier this week. He will hold talks with his North Korean counterpart Pak Ui Chun and may also meet with Kim, before traveling to South Korea tomorrow.

Russia, along with China, Japan, South Korea and the U.S., is pressing the regime to dismantle its nuclear program. The country also shares a 19-kilometer (12-mile) border with North Korea. The state-run Korea Central News Agency announced Lavrov’s arrival in the capital, Pyongyang, without giving details of his itinerary.

Kim’s government, which tested a nuclear weapon in 2006, has said it plans to resume reprocessing spent atomic fuel at its Yongbyon plant, the source of the regime’s weapons-grade plutonium, and will consider building new reactors.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said yesterday the U.S. won’t give in to North Korea’s “unpredictable behavior,” while adding that the Obama administration has also made it clear it is prepared to resume the negotiations.

“The North Koreans have not demonstrated any willingness to resume the six-party process,” Clinton told the House Foreign Affairs Committee in Washington. “I think we have to be strong, patient, persistent and not give in to the kind of back- and-forth, the unpredictable behavior” of North Korea.

Kim’s regime agreed in February 2007 to scrap the program in return for energy aid and normalized diplomatic ties with the U.S. and Japan. The disarmament talks had stalled after North Korea refused to let inspectors remove samples from Yongbyon.

To contact the reporter on this story: Michael Heath in Sydney at [e-mail].

Last Updated: April 23, 2009 01:17 EDT

Russian envoy to press North Korea on arms project

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSTRE53M13T20090423

Thu Apr 23, 2009 1:17am EDT

By Jack Kim

SEOUL (Reuters) - Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will press North Korea not to restart its nuclear arms project when he meets officials in Pyongyang after arriving for a two-day visit Thursday.

"Sergei Viktorovich Lavrov, foreign minister of the Russian Federation, and his party arrived here today," the North's official KCNA news agency said in a typically brief dispatch.

North Korea kicked out U.N. nuclear inspectors and threatened to resume operations at a nuclear plant that makes bomb-grade plutonium last week after the U.N. Security Council condemned the North for launching a long-range rocket on April 5.

Frustration with North Korea has been growing after Pyongyang said it was quitting six-party nuclear disarmament talks and nullifying agreements reached with South Korea, the United States, Japan, Russia and China since their start in 2003.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Wednesday Washington wanted the six-party talks among those countries to resume and urged the world to not "give in" to the North's "unpredictable behavior."

Lavrov said he would try to press the North to return to the talks and expected Pyongyang to do so, Interfax news agency said Wednesday.

China, the North's closest ally and biggest benefactor, has called on the United States to engage Pyongyang directly in dialogue to ease escalating tension after it and Russia joined the Security Council censure for the rocket launch.

The two countries have the strongest ties to the isolated communist state but North Korea has shown the limits of their influence by pressing ahead with its nuclear arms project and ballistic missile tests.

North Korea, which was also hit with U.N. sanctions after a missile test in July 2006 and after its only nuclear test a few months later, has used its military threat for years to gain global attention and squeeze concessions out of regional powers.

In rare talks with Seoul, North Korea Tuesday refused to discuss the fate of a South Korean worker it had been holding for almost a month for allegedly insulting its political system, and demanded higher wages and rent from firms that operate factories in an industrial enclave in its territory.

North Korea, angered by the decision of South Korean President Lee Myung-bak after he took office a year ago to cut a steady flow of aid to his impoverished neighbor, has disrupted work at the Kaesong factory park to put pressure on Seoul to drop its hard line.

Lavrov is scheduled to visit Seoul Friday.
Russia opens efforts to get NKorea back into talks

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iURO8fOyWVOA0ytFlaAGuC9F7R9wD97NU6HG0

By JAE-SOON CHANG – 41 minutes ago

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Russia launched a mission Thursday to try to get North Korea back into international disarmament talks, sending its top diplomat to Pyongyang after the North announced it would restart its nuclear program.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov arrived in North Korea for a two-day visit that could include a meeting with leader Kim Jong Il. The North's Korean Central News Agency reported Lavrov's arrival in Pyongyang in a brief dispatch.

North Korea last week expelled all international monitors of its plutonium-producing facilities, vowed to restart them and quit six-nation disarmament talks, after the U.N. Security Council condemned its April 5 rocket launch.

Pyongyang says the rebuke is unfair because the liftoff was a peaceful satellite launch. But the U.S. and others believe it was a test of long-range missile technology.

Lavrov is expected to focus on trying to persuade the North to return to the nuclear negotiating table. South Korean and Russian media reports said he could meet with the North's reclusive leader and deliver a letter from Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei said earlier this week that the North could restart its nuclear facilities within months — a move that could lead to production of weapons-grade plutonium.

North Korea's relations are not as close with Russia as they were during Soviet times, but the two sides maintain cordial ties. Moscow is a member of the six-party nuclear talks and usually avoids openly criticizing Pyongyang.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Robert Wood said the U.S. is working on trying to get Pyongyang's decision reversed.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told a House hearing that Washington is ready to resume the nuclear talks and that she thinks "strong support that we see among the parties against what North Korea's doing will eventually yield fruit," according to Yonhap news agency.

"We have to be strong, patient and consistent and not give in to the kind of back and forth and the unpredictable behavior of the North Korean regime," Clinton was quoted as saying.

Lavrov also plans to visit South Korea on Friday after the North Korean trip.

Tensions on the divided peninsula have been also been running high. The two sides held their first official dialogue Tuesday since Seoul's conservative President Lee Myung-bak took office last year, but the meeting ended without progress.

North Korea rejected the South's request for the release of a Seoul worker being held at a joint industrial zone in Kaesong, just north of the border, for allegedly denouncing Pyongyang's political system. The North also demanded the South pay more to use the factory park.

Relations between the two Koreas have frayed badly as North Korea has denounced the South Korean government's tougher stance. It cut off reconciliation talks and suspended key joint projects, leaving the industrial zone as the only major remaining project.

Under a 2007 six-party deal, North Korea agreed to disable its main nuclear complex in Yongbyon north of Pyongyang in return for 1 million tons of fuel oil and other concessions. In June 2008, North Korea blew up the cooling tower there in a dramatic show of its commitment to denuclearization.

But disablement came to halt a month later as Pyongyang wrangled with Washington over how to verify its past atomic activities. The latest round of talks, in December, failed to push the process forward.

Armenian president pays a working visit to Russia

http://www.itar-tass.com/eng/level2.html?NewsID=13865938&PageNum=0

MOSCOW, April 23 (Itar-Tass) - Armenia’s President Serge Sargsyan will on Thursday pay a working visit to Russia at the invitation of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

A Kremlin source told Itar-Tass the agenda of the forthcoming talks would include a wide range of issues related to Russian-Armenian relations, l measures to overcome the negative consequences of the global financial crisis, the situation in the Caucasus and other international problems.

Trade and economic issues will dominate the talks. Russia is Armenia’s main foreign economic and investment partner. In 2008, the trade turnover between the two countries stood at 899.9 million dollars (it had grown by 9.5% since 2007). Russia’s investments in Armenia’s economy exceeded 1.8 billion dollars. The main investment spheres include energy, the banking sector, the construction industry, communications, mining and metallurgy.

Several major Russian companies such as Gazprom, Inter RAO EUS energy holdings, the Russian Railways, the VTB Bank, the Sistema company, etc.

The two presidents will pay special attention to energy cooperation. Russian companies meet Armenia’s demands in natural gas and nuclear fuel. The two countries implement joint gas and energy projects, the Kremlin source went on to say.

Priority areas of cooperation include modernization of Armenia’s railway infrastructure with assistance from the Russian Railways Company and the development of a railway ferry crossing Caucasus-Poti-Caucasus.

Partnership and cooperation within the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), of which Armenia is holding a rotating chairmanship, and integration processes in the CIS territory are a separate topic for discussion.

“The heads of state will discuss the Karabakh problem. Russia, which is an international broker and a co-chairman of the OSCE Minsk Group on the Nagorno-Karabakh settlement remains unchanged. Moscow will continue assisting Yerevan and Baku in finding mutually acceptable solutions,” the Kremlin source emphasized.