Dan Coats: Russia and China implementing North Korea sanctions

The United States will continue to “pressure” Russia and China to move “forward” with international sanctions on North Korea, according to the head of the U.S. intelligence community.

“The sanctions are basically being held,” Dan Coats, the director of National Intelligence, said during the Aspen Security Forum on Thursday. “We continue to have Chinese support; we continue to have Russian support. … So, right now we have the pressure on them to go forward and we’ll see how it plays out.”

Coats offered that assessment in contradiction to worries that China and Russia are allowing the pariah regime to evade sanctions in the wake of President Trump’s summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. He expressed deep distrust of the regime’s sincerity in the talks, but suggested that the sanctions pressure makes the exercise worthwhile.

“I don’t think we should go forward with the assumption that all this is going to work,” he told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell during the Aspen event. “But having the opportunity to try to succeed here instead of potentially going to war with a potentially nuclear-armed nation and, what we evaluated, an unstable leader, why not give it a shot?”

He made those comments on the same day that the two U.S. adversaries placed a hold on an American assessment that North Korea is in violation of a U.N. Security Council sanctions resolution that curtails the regime’s authority to import oil.

“Russia and China asked for more time to scrutinize the document and requested ample proof that the quota for the supplies had been used up,” a diplomatic source told TASS, a Russian state-run media outlet.

U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley’s team filed a report last week assessing that North Korea has breached the Security Council’s cap on how many barrels of oil the regime can import annually. The report, which chronicled 89 illegal oil transfers made between smugglers at sea, included a demand that Russia and China stop providing the oil that they say North Korea remains legally entitled to import.

“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,” Haley’s team argued in the report.

Coats acknowledged that such smuggling of coal and oil is taking place.

“Their ability to import that has dropped dramatically and that hurts them economically,” he said. “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.”

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