{{The White House has urged Moscow to do more to restrain saber-rattling North Korea, but despite historically strong ties with its nuclear-armed neighbor, Russia does not have special influence that could help defuse growing tensions on the Korean Peninsula, experts said Tuesday.}}
“Russia doesn’t have any exclusive ways to influence North Korea,” Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, said by telephone on Tuesday.
Unlike China, by far North Korea’s most significant military and economic partner, Russia’s trade links with the insular state are negligible.
They include North Korean logging camps in Siberia, a Soviet-era holdover that Western journalists have compared to the gulag.
Without economic influence over North Korea, with whom it shares a 19-kilometer border in the Russian Far East, Moscow must leverage traditionally warm relations with Pyongyang, said Leonid Kalashnikov, deputy chairman of the State Duma’s International Affairs Committee.
Late North Korean leader Kim Jong Il was widely believed to have been born in the Soviet Union, which supported and inspired Pyongyang’s Stalinist government, and Russia is one of the few countries he officially visited, including several months before he died of a stroke in December 2011.
Likewise, Vladimir Putin chose North Korea for his first official trip as president in 2000.
But warm relations did not stop Russia from joining international condemnation over North Korea’s third-known nuclear test in February, and it has long joined the United States, China and others in calling for Pyongyang to halt development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.
Lacking the United States’ military muscle and China’s economic sway over Pyongyang, Russia has opted for the role of cool-headed peacemaker, urging all sides to show restraint and return to the stalled six-party talks.
This applies to North Korea as well as South Korea and the United States, both of which it has threatened to attack.
{Visitors to the demilitarized zone gazing through binoculars into North Korea’s Kaesong industrial town Tuesday.}
{Moscow Times}
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