China and Russia “want to go around the rules” that restrict North Korea’s access to oil to the detriment of negotiations over the regime’s nuclear weapons program, top U.S. diplomats protested Friday.
“The best way we can support those talks is to not loosen the sanctions,” Ambassador Nikki Haley, the U.S. representative at the United Nations, told reporters. “The problem that we are encountering is that some of our friends have decided that they want to go around the rules.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo joined Haley in New York to brief the U.N. Security Council about the status of denuclearization talks with North Korea. The meeting focused significantly on North Korea’s access to oil and other energy sources, as Haley’s team filed a report assessing that the regime has violated annual caps on oil imports and demanded an embargo pursuant to recent sanctions resolutions, only to be rebuffed by China and Russia.
“Right now, North Korea is illegally smuggling petroleum products into the country at a level that far exceeds the quotas established by the United Nations,” Pompeo said. “The United States reminds every member-state of its responsibility to stop illegal ship-to-ship transfers and we urge them to step up their enforcement efforts as well.”
The Security Council voted in December to limit North Korea to 500,000 barrels of oil annually. Haley reported that North Korea breached that cap between February and May, depending on whether the tankers that U.S. officials identified as smuggling petroleum were fully loaded or not.
“[China and Russia] continue to sell refined petroleum products to the DPRK,” Haley’s team said in the assessment last week. “These sales and any other transfer must immediately stop since the United States believes the DPRK has breached the UNSCR 2397 refined petroleum products quota for 2018.”
China cast doubt on the accuracy of Haley’s report. “We believe that in accordance with the relevant Security Council resolutions and the regulations of the Sanctions Committee, decisions on this matter should be made after thorough discussions based on solid and credible facts and evidence,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Friday.
Haley dismissed such questions. “We have photographs of proof of ship-to-ship transfers,” she said incredulously. “We don’t need any more information. The sanctions committee has what it needs. We all know whats going forward. We put pressure today on China and Russia to abide and be good helpers in this situation and to help us continue with denuclearization.”
Dan Coats, the director of National Intelligence, confirmed Thursday that the smuggling is taking place, although he suggested that the North Koreans aren’t deriving great benefits from the exercise.
“The sanctions are basically being held,” Coats said at the Aspen Security Forum Thursday. “There are ship-to-ship transfers that it’s been hard to interdict and so they are gaining some energy from those … but that is not so substantive that it has bypassed the ability for them to see the consequences of sanctions.”
U.S. officials hope that they can discourage further sanctions evasion by broadcasting the assessments of the oil smuggling.
“Where we find issues where there’s any country, whether it’s Russia or another one, not doing their part to enforce it, we’re going to make sure that we provide the information to them so that they can all see it and the world can see it,” Pompeo said.
