Category: North Korea

This is probably another reason why the Kim regime is busy courting Russian support, in order to influence members of the United Nations to not strongly implement sanctions against North Korea:

The US government appears to be tightening the reins on the international community’s implementation of sanctions against North Korea. After the second North Korea-US summit ended without a joint agreement, the US first articulated the tough stance that it won’t lift sanctions until the North has completely denuclearized and then pushed the UN to keep member states on board with the tough sanctions.

On Mar. 13, the US State Department announced that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had met with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in Washington, DC, that same day. During the meeting, the State Department said, the two leaders had discussed a range of issues, including the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, developments in Venezuela and the humanitarian crisis in Yemen.

In regard to the Korean Peninsula, Pompeo appears to have told Guterres about the results of the North Korea-US summit and asked for his cooperation in implementing the UN Security Council’s sanctions against North Korea. A yearly report by a panel of experts that was released by the UN Security Council Sanctions Committee on North Korea the previous day addressed North Korea’s violations of the sanctions, including ship-to-ship transfers. In recent days, Pompeo has been emphasizing that sanctions on North Korea were the decision not of the US but of the UN Security Council and that the US has built a completely international coalition to implement those sanctions.

Hankyoreh

You can read more at the link.

I can only imagine what criminal schemes the Russians and North Koreans are discussing to skirt United Nations sanctions:

A group of Russian senators is visiting North Korea, the latest in a series of talks between the two countries following the collapse of the U.S.-North Korea summit in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Sergei Kislyak, the first deputy chairman of the Russian Federation Council’s Committee for Foreign Affairs and one of the Russian delegates, said the visit from March 16 to 21 will be “an absolutely natural, normal practice” to continue dialogue between the two countries.

But speculation is rampant it results from Pyongyang’s desperate bid to woo support from Moscow, following the collapse of talks between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

The failure of talks apparently clouds the North Korean leader’s plans to rebuild the country’s economy by convincing the U.S. to lift nuclear sanctions against his regime.

China, the North’s closet ally, is believed to be remaining prudent in its stance over the summit collapse.

“The goal of the visit (to North Korea) is to continue the dialogue with a country that is friendly to us and that is solving most difficult problems in the foreign and domestic policies,” Kislyak told Russian news agency TASS after arriving at Pyongyang Sunan International Airport, March 16. “We have things to discuss, we wish to better understand the aspirations of our North Korean neighbors, and I think that this dialogue is an absolutely natural, normal practice that we will continue in our relations.”

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

This news makes me wonder if the intent behind the raid was to cause the Hanoi Summit to fail?:

Days before President Donald Trump was set to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Vietnam, a mysterious incident in Spain threatened to derail the entire high-stakes nuclear summit.
In broad daylight, masked assailants infiltrated North Korea’s Embassy in Madrid, restrained the staff with rope, stole computers and mobile phones, and fled in two luxury vehicles.

The group behind the late February operation is known as Cheollima Civil Defense, a secretive dissident organization committed to overthrowing the Kim dynasty, people familiar with the planning and execution of the mission told The Washington Post.
The group’s alleged role in the attack has not previously been reported, and officials from the governments of North Korea, the United States, and Spain declined to comment on it.

But in recent days, rumors have swirled about the motivations behind the attack in the Spanish media, including a report in El Pais alleging that two of the masked assailants have ties to the CIA.
People familiar with the incident say the group did not act in coordination with any governments. American intelligence agencies would have been especially reluctant to do so given the mission’s sensitive timing and brazen nature. But the raid represents the most ambitious operation to date for an obscure organization that seeks to undermine the North Korean regime and encourage mass defections, they say.
“This group is the first known resistance movement against North Korea, which makes its activities very newsworthy,” said Sung-Yoon Lee, a North Korea expert at Tufts University. [Washington Post]

You can read more at the link, but I would think there is going to be a covert war against the dissidents now by North Korea and their allies.

What is it about N Korea that appeals to both far left & the far right, makes David Duke approvingly republish Bruce Cumings, & makes the alt-right exalt the racism & misogyny that the alt-left overlooks?
Maybe it just attracts inadequate souls who want to burn the world down. https://t.co/LLXSobdaHw

— Joshua Stanton (@freekorea_us) March 15, 2019

All Korean people? https://t.co/UOeMHeJM9s

— 🇰🇷Edward Oh🇺🇸 (@EdwardHBOh) March 13, 2019

It looks like the North Koreans are confirming what we all already knew, they never had any intention of really denuclearizing:

 A senior North Korean official announced Friday that her regime is rethinking whether to continue nuclear talks with the United States and maintain a moratorium on missile tests, according to foreign news reports.
Speaking at an urgent meeting with diplomats and foreign media in Pyongyang, Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui cited the U.S. attitude in the recent Hanoi summit.
“We have no intention to yield to the U.S. demands (at the Hanoi summit) in any form, nor are we willing to engage in negotiations of this kind,” she was quoted as saying by Russia’s TASS news agency.
The Associated Press also quoted Choe as saying that her country was deeply disappointed by the failure to strike an agreement in Hanoi late last month.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but all President Trump said during the summit was that if the Kim regime closed down all their nuclear facilities he would remove the economic sanctions. The Kim regime clearly is not ready to do that.

This is pretty bold of the CIA if true:

Spanish intelligence officials believe at least two of the 10 attackers who broke into the North Korean embassy in Madrid last month, holding staff hostage and making off with computers, are linked to the CIA, according to a report in El País.

Police and Spain’s national intelligence centre (CNI) are investigating the unusual robbery, which took place on 22 February in the west of the capital.
The online newspaper El Confidencial, which broke news of the raid, reported that the group of men tied up and threatened staff, fleeing only after a woman managed to free herself and raise the alarm. (…..)

El País pointed out that the robbery took place five days before Donald Trump’s second summit with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un.
It suggested the intruders could have been looking for information relating to Kim’s top negotiator, Kim Hyok Chol, who served as ambassador to Spain before being expelled in September 2017.

MSN via a reader tip

You can read more at the link.

Pyongyang has socialized too many pundits to be so empathetic to what terms might be acceptable to it, they've lost sight of what terms should be acceptable to us. That is how an industry secedes from the mainstream, self-marginalizes, & abdicates its influence. https://t.co/cvoObNrlOS

— Joshua Stanton (@freekorea_us) March 11, 2019

It looks like more people are beginning to catch on to my idea that the North Koreans may attempt a satellite launch:

The expert added that a more likely explanation was that the North is feigning a missile launch to press Washington for a renegotiation and would not go forward with the act since too much is at stake. 

Another possibility, according to a South Korean government source who asked not to be named, is that the North is preparing to actually launch a satellite equipped with technology recently brought in from friendly countries like China.

“The last time the North shot up a satellite was in 2016 with the launch of the Kwangmyongsong-4,” the source said. 

“Since then, North Korea has been focusing on obtaining satellite technology through unofficial cooperation with other countries or by hacking, and latest intelligence suggests they have completed a new reconnaissance satellite.”

North Korea maintains a distinction between military testing of its ballistic missiles and that of its satellites, though nuclear experts abroad say the fact that the same type of rockets are used for both purposes makes that difference hollow.

UN Security Council Resolution 1718 – approved unanimously by all members in 2006 – forbids any type of rocket launches from the North, be it for satellite or missile purposes.

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link, but I thought they may attempt a satellite launch to give them plausible deniability they are testing ICBMs and say they have every right to peaceful space exploration. This also gives the Chinese and Russians some cover to shutdown any more sanctions the US may try to impose after the launch through the United Nations.

This becomes a way the Kim regime can increase tensions and put pressure back on the Trump administration with likely little consequences.

#NorthKoreaStory
1. Build them & they will come & pay
2. Pretend to dismantle them & they'll pay more
3. Repeat & they'll pay even more
4. Act weird & threaten war, repeat Step 2, reap more goodies
5. Sequelize until #USFK are evicted
6. Complete the Vietnam Model of Unification https://t.co/ewCAaAXnA8

— Sung-Yoon Lee (@SungYoonLee1) March 9, 2019