UN Sanctions on North Korea at Risk in Putin-Trump Dealings – The Diplomat

In a head-spinning reversal of U.S. policy, President Donald Trump has set about engaging in negotiations with Russia, leaving Ukraine largely as an observer in efforts to end the Russia-Ukraine war. Also apparently missing from the talks is any mention of North Korea. 

This does not bode well for breathing life back into the U.N. sanctions against North Korea.

For more than a year, North Korea has supplied weapons and manpower to fuel Russian President Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine – a serious violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions. Ignoring such violations will only serve to further erode international norms against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and embolden North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s nuclear ambitions, deepening instability on the Korean peninsula.

Any real prospects of reviving the U.N. sanctions regime will require Moscow to recommit to U.N. sanctions – a daunting, perhaps impossible, task. The bigger problem, however, is that neither Trump nor Putin has much incentive to address the North Korea issue.

U.N. Sanctions in Decay 

A lack of political consensus and continued flagrant violations by Russia have left the U.N. sanctions regime against North Korea in a state of severe decay. The 1718 Committee (formed by the U.N. Security Council in 2006 to oversee the sanctions regime) has been unable to move past political differences since 2017, which is the last time it adopted new sanctions. The effort to hold Pyongyang accountable for its violations of U.N. resolutions is effectively at a standstill.

The beginning of the end came in May 2022, when Russia and China vetoed a U.N. resolution that would have imposed additional sanctions on North Korea’s oil imports – for the first time since 2006 – following the country’s series of provocations, including its test launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile in March 2022. 

The final blow came in March 2024 when Russia vetoed a U.N. resolution to extend the mandate of the Panel of Experts, the independent eight-member body responsible for monitoring the implementation of sanctions and reporting instances of violations to the U.N. Security Council. China abstained. The vote effectively shuttered the only body responsible for monitoring and reporting on North Korea’s sanctions evasion activities. 

Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzia, railed against what he called “open-ended” sanctions against North Korea that have lost their relevance and are “largely detached from reality.” He derided the Panel of Experts as “reduced to playing into the hands of Western approaches, reprinting biased information and analyzing newspaper headlines and poor-quality photos.” 

In a joint statement, the United States, France, Japan, South Korea, and the United Kingdom called Russia’s actions “nothing more than an attempt to silence independent, objective investigations into persistent violations of [U.N.] Security Council resolutions by [North Korea] and by Russia itself,” alluding to North Korea’s alleged shipments of arms to Russia for use in Ukraine. 

In the two years since it started supporting Russia’s war effort, North Korea increased its number of ballistic missile tests, made significant improvements in nuclear and ballistic missile technology, and significantly increased revenue-generating activities, including a major theft of cryptocurrency and the dispatch of IT workers in China and Russia. Just this past month, the Open Source Centre – a London-based nonprofit organization – uncovered a sanctioned Russian vessel that ferried arms from North Korea to Russia, making at least nine trips in the last five months. It also appears that North Korea’s global networks that previously supplied military equipment are once again active. 

These activities show how Russia and China’s abdication opened major rifts in the U.N. sanctions regime that North Korea exploited to its benefit.

Trump and Putin’s North Korea Dilemma

The dilemma is that Putin has few incentives to abandon his new strategic partner, North Korea, and Trump has few incentives to revisit one of his biggest foreign policy failures of his first term. 

First, Kim Jong Un has zero interest in returning to the status quo. His newly forged strategic partnership and increased economic cooperation with Russia is the lifeline needed to keep his nuclear weapons program running. Furthermore, according to some reports, North Korea’s losses in Ukraine have been steep – a factor that Russia would be hard-pressed to ignore and one that Kim is not likely to let Putin forget any time soon. 

Second, Trump has expressed little interest in re-engaging with Kim Jong Un – despite the billet-doux between the two leaders. There is no doubt the president saw the failure of the 2019 Hanoi summit with Kim as an embarrassment and personal affront. Ankit Panda and Vipin Narang pinned the blunder on two opposing demands: Washington insisted that North Korea abandon its nuclear weapons before any concessions were made, while Pyongyang demanded that the United States lift all sanctions before discussing denuclearization. 

What Comes Next?

It is hard to imagine a scenario where Trump is able to extract concessions from Russia, let alone force Moscow’s hand on North Korea. The U.S. president has already abandoned much of his negotiating leverage: within the last two months, Trump called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “dictator,” falsely suggested that Ukraine started the war, voted against a U.N. General Assembly resolution that condemned Russia’s aggression in Ukraine – breaking from U.S. allies –  and publicly berated Zelenskyy in the Oval Office that led to a temporary pause in all US military and intelligence aid. 

Nonetheless, Washington should work to keep North Korea on the agenda with Russia. Pretending Russia did not violate its international obligations ignores the growing threat from North Korea that Moscow directly contributed to and only further emboldens Kim to grow his nuclear arsenal, further destabilizing the Asia-Pacific region. This past February, North Korea threatened the United States with nuclear weapons over its military cooperation with South Korea. 

Also, Trump should also keep in mind that reinvigorating the U.N. sanctions regime against North Korea provides a much stronger position for the United States, should he decide to pursue another summit with Kim Jong Un. Washington must find ways to erode Kim’s relationship with Putin if there is to be any chance of pursuing negotiations with North Korea.

To start, any ceasefire agreement should include the complete removal of North Korean troops from the Russia-Ukraine battlefield. As a second step, Russia must cease its imports of North Korean arms, a violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions, and recommit to upholding its international obligations. This could include an assurance to unconditionally adopt a resolution that immediately reinstates the Panel of Experts, with the body free – without reservation – to investigate any potential Russian violations of U.N. sanctions.

Pressing Moscow to honor its international obligations would not only offer an off-ramp to Putin and salvage the U.N. sanctions regime, but would also help drive a wedge between Moscow and Pyongyang, ultimately providing leverage to the Trump administration to start negotiations with North Korea. Despite fair criticism that U.N. sanctions have failed to bring North Korea to the negotiating table, they did help enshrine international norms against nuclear proliferation. Failing to address Russia’s North Korea problem would spell disaster for the sanctions regime and further erode global nonproliferation norms.