North Korea’s deputy foreign minister has accused the United States of “unjust and outrageous hostility” towards Pyongyang and Moscow, claiming that it demonstrates Washington’s hegemonic mentality founded on Cold War thinking.
“The US ill-minded repugnancy towards the North Korea-Russia relations only reveals that it lacks power and wits in the showdown with the anti-imperialist independent countries,” Im Chon Il said in a statement issued on Sunday.
The security alliance of the United States, South Korea, and Japan, as well as the Washington-led NATO military bloc, are “cancer-like entities endangering the international order,” according to the ambassador, who called NATO “the mastermind of the Ukrainian crisis.”
Im went on to say relations between North Korea and Russia have reached “the height of development” due to actions by the US and its allies, who “have gone to the extremes in their confrontational and divisive moves for gaining hegemony.”
North Korea intends to further boost its ties with Russia and other “independent sovereign countries” in order to “deter the imperialists’ military threat… and firmly defend peace and security on the Korean peninsula and in the rest of the world,” the diplomat insisted.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un spent over a week in Russia last month, arriving by train in the country’s Far East. He met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu, and other officials during his tour. Kim visited the Vostochny Cosmodrome, examined military and civilian aviation facilities, and saw Russia’s nuclear-capable strategic bombers and fighter fighters, including a MiG-31 aircraft armed with the Kinzhal hypersonic missile.
The visit sparked outrage in both Seoul and Washington, with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declaring that “military cooperation between North Korea and Russia is illegal and unjust because it violates UN Security Council resolutions and various other international sanctions.”
Similar comments were made by US officials, who also speculated that Putin and Kim had been discussing the supply of shells by North Korea to Russia amid the conflict in Ukraine. White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby warned that if Moscow and Pyongyang were to “decide to move forward with some sort of arms deals, well, obviously we’ll take a measure of that, and we’ll deal with it appropriately.”
