China and Russia submitted a draft proposal to U.N. Security Council nations on Friday calling for the relaxation of North Korea-related sanctions, citing the absence of nuclear and long-range missile testing by Pyongyang since 2017, multiple informed sources told NK News.
The draft proposal is the first one the two countries have put forward to weaken UNSC sanctions on the DPRK since Dec. 2019. The number of sanctions on North Korea snowballed significantly during its major nuclear and missile tests in 2017.
The proposal comes amid South Korea-led efforts to get the U.S. and other nations to sign off on a formal declaration to end the Korean War before the end of Moon Jae-in’s presidency next year.
The suggested sanctions relief largely mirror China and Russia’s Dec. 2019 proposals, which the two countries never officially submitted to the UNSC due to U.S. disinterest, sources said.
In particular, the package argues for the relief of sanctions targeting North Korea’s civilian sector, according to sources. These include rules forbidding the sale to North Korea of civilian sector commodities such as equipment for construction, heating, railroads, domestic appliances, tools and computers, an informed source said.
The draft proposal follows a long absence of North Korean long-range missile and nuclear weapons testing and includes language surrounding contemporary hot topics like the end-of-war declaration and inter-Korean relations. But another informed source said the other permanent members of the UNSC are unlikely to sign off on the joint China-Russia proposal.
North Korea’s recent missile firings, including submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) and train-launched ballistic missile tests, means the proposal is unlikely to get past Washington and Paris in particular, sources said. The tests contravene U.N. sanctions that call for the suspension of DPRK ballistic missile tests.
“The sectors on which the Chinese and Russians seem to be seeking an easing of sanctions look like the ones where sanctions would need to be relaxed in order to implement the ROK-DPRK Panmunjom and Pyongyang agreements of 2018,” said John Everard, the U.K.’s former ambassador to the DPRK.
“I wonder whether they are trying to split the ROK from the U.S.,” he said, adding that the timing of the PRC and Russian proposal suggests it could be “linked to the ROK election campaign.”
Everard agreed the proposal is unlikely to go far.
“True, the DPRK has not recently tested either an ICBM or a nuclear device, but it has tested several other weapons,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any appetite for easing sanctions.”
The proposal comes after China’s ambassador to the U.N. urged the UNSC to relax North Korean sanctions in October, after his U.S. counterpart called for more rigid enforcement of the existing sanctions regime.
“It has always been China’s view that we should also address the humanitarian dimension caused by the sanctions imposed by the Security Council. We [have] seen negative impact because of the sanctions,” Zhang Jun said in October.
Zhang indicated at the time that Beijing and Moscow had “tabled a draft of the resolution,” without specifying which resolution or when it was put together. Pyongyang’s SLBM test on Oct. 19 appears to have delayed the proposal’s submission.
Kim Heung-kyu, director of the U.S.-China Policy Institute at Ajou University, told NK News in October that Beijing was likely more interested in using the then-rumored proposal to signal support to Pyongyang than in addressing humanitarian concerns.
“It’s a fairly safe way for China to show its efforts to North Korea while implicitly expressing to them ‘you too should cooperate in our national interests,’” Kim said. “Both South Korea and the U.S. government already support the provision of humanitarian aid to North Korea.”
