BB.lv: North Korean weapons in Ukraine demonstrate the weakness of the UN

Since 2006, the UN Security Council has passed nine major sanctions on North Korea to curb its missile and nuclear programs.

In June of the same year, the Security Council established an embargo on the export of arms to North Korea and the purchase of weapons produced by it.

In June 2009, the embargo was extended to all types of weapons, with the exception of the export of small arms and light weapons to the country, and in 2015, these exports were banned.

All these sanctions were approved and signed, including by Moscow.

“However, late last year a series of visits by Russian senior leaders to North Korea focused on meeting Russia’s growing demand for weapons, artillery shells and missiles to support its war in Ukraine,” Bell writes.

Britain’s Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) tracked four Russian cargo ships, each carrying hundreds of containers.

He estimates that since the deal was struck last year, North Korea has sold Russia more than 7,000 containers containing more than one million shells and missiles, which Moscow has consistently denied.

At the same time, it turned out, writes a Sky News analyst, that the missiles were stuffed with Western technologies. Most of the electronics, according to the publication, were produced in the United States or Europe and were purchased over the past few years.

This means, the Sky News expert concludes, that despite the sanctions, Pyongyang managed to illegally purchase a large amount of Western technology, assemble missiles and sell them to Russia for use in the war with Ukraine.

This, according to Bell, undermines the authority of the UN, given that Russia signed a ban on the export of North Korean weapons, but at the same time flagrantly ignores this ban in order to meet its wartime needs.

The UN appears powerless to enforce its own sanctions.