North Korea shipped coal to Russia last year which was then delivered to South Korea and Japan in a likely violation of UN sanctions, three Western European intelligence sources said….
North Korea shipped coal to Russia last year which was then delivered to South Korea and Japan in a likely violation of UN sanctions, three Western European intelligence sources said.
The UN Security Council banned North Korean exports of coal last August 5 under sanctions intended to cut off an important source of the foreign currency Pyongyang needs to fund its nuclear weapon and missile programmes.
But the secretive Communist state has at least three times since then shipped coal to the Russian ports of Nakhodka and Kholmsk, where it was unloaded at docks and reloaded onto ships that took it to South Korea or Japan, the sources said.
A Western shipping source said separately that some of the cargoes reached Japan and South Korea in October last year. A US security source also confirmed the coal trade via Russia and said it was continuing.
“Russia’s port of Nakhodka is becoming a transhipping hub for North Korean coal,” said one of the European security sources, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of international diplomacy around North Korea.
Asked to respond to the report, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday that Russia abided by international law.
“Russia is a responsible member of the international community,” he told reporters on a conference call.
Interfax news agency quoted an unidentified official at Russia’s embassy to North Korea on Friday as saying Russia did not buy coal from North Korea and was “not a transit point for coal deliveries to third countries.”
Russia’s mission to the United Nations told the Security Council sanctions committee on November 3 that Moscow was complying with the sanctions. Two lawyers who specialise in sanctions law told Reuters it appeared the transactions violated UN sanctions.
The US Treasury on Wednesday put the owner of one of the ships, the UAL Ji Bong 6, under sanctions for delivering North Korean coal to Kholmsk on September 5. It was unclear which companies profited from the coal shipments.
North Korean coal exports were initially capped under a 2016 Security Council resolution that required countries to report monthly imports of coal from North Korea to the council’s sanctions committee within 30 days of the end of each month.
