Russia is planning to retaliate against the United States over sanctions against entities doing business with North Korea, a senior official warned, the latest in a string of threats from Moscow following sanctions approved by Washington.
“Washington has made the same mistake again,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said late Wednesday in a statement. “In the meantime, we will get down to charting the retaliatory measures that are inevitable in this situation.”
The threat came after the Treasury Department targeted four individuals and one Russian company involved, variously, in supporting the North Korean nuclear weapons program or defying sanctions that restricted the transport of oil into the country. The moves followed a series of warnings from the State Department that the United States would work to tighten implementation of international sanctions on the pariah state, which China and Russia have long enabled. But Ryabkov linked them to broader sanctions targeting Russia over other foreign policy issues.
“The US side continues to systematically destroy bilateral relations under a trend set by the Barack Obama administration,” he said. “Against this deplorable backdrop, statements by US representatives about a desire to stabilize bilateral ties sound highly unconvincing. Then again, when the US adopted the well-known anti-Russia law, it also cited the striving to improve our relations as the main motivation.”
The “anti-Russia law” Ryabkov mentioned is a broad sanctions package passed by Congress designed to punish Russia for three different policies: the cyberattacks on the Democratic Party and some state election systems in 2016; the invasion of Ukraine, which the United States agreed to protect in exchange for the former Soviet state surrendering its nuclear weapons; and the Russian decision to partner with Iran in support of Syrian President Bashar Assad, who has used chemical weapons on civilians in order to win a civil war in his country.
“Over the past few years, Washington should have grasped the idea that we consider the language of sanctions to be unacceptable, and that such actions only hamper the resolution of real problems,” Ryabkov said.
North Korea has made sudden and dramatic advances in its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile program, recently obtaining and testing Soviet-made intercontinental ballistic missiles. U.N. sanctions were supposed to starve the regime of the money needed to fund such programs, but China — and, more recently, Russia — have helped prop up the regime’s economy. So Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warned that the United States would start sanctioning the businesses that work with the regime.
“This new pressure campaign will be swiftly implemented and painful to North Korean interests,” Tillerson said at a U.N. Security Council meeting in April. “I realize some nations for which a relationship with North Korea has been in some ways a net positive may be disinclined to implement the measures of pressure on North Korea, but the catastrophic effects of a North Korean nuclear strike outweigh any economic benefits.”
