WASHINGTON: Russia has been quietly shipping refined petroleum to North Korea at levels that appear to violate a cap imposed by the United Nations Security Council, the White House said on Thursday, with new sanctions to come soon in response.

The disclosure came on the first day after a UN panel of experts monitoring enforcement of longstanding UN sanctions against North Korea for its nuclear weapons and missile programs was disbanded after a Russian veto.
“At the same time that Moscow vetoed the panel’s mandate renewal, Russia has been shipping refined petroleum from Port Vostochny to the DPRK (North Korea),” White House national security spokesperson John Kirby told reporters.
Under UN sanctions, Pyongyang is limited to importing 500,000 barrels of refined products a year. The Russian and North Korean UN missions in New York did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the US accusation.
Kirby said that in March alone, Russia shipped more than 165,000 barrels of refined petroleum to North Korea and that given the close proximity of Russian and North Korean commercial ports, Russia could sustain these shipments indefinitely.
Russia blocked the annual renewal of the UN sanctions monitors in late March in what a US official described as a calculated move by Moscow to hide its own violations of UN Security Council resolutions.
Kirby said the United States will continue to impose sanctions “against those working to facilitate arms and refined petroleum transfers between Russia and the DPRK.” North Korea is formally known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
“We have previously worked to coordinate autonomous sanctions designations with our partners — including Australia, the European Union, Japan, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, and the United Kingdom — and we will continue to do so,” he said.
State Department spokesperson Matt Miller said the United States and its allies are working to announce “new coordinated sanctions designations this month.”
The US and South Korea in March launched a task force aimed at preventing North Korea from procuring illicit oil.
The US and others have also accused North Korea of transferring weapons to Russia for use against Ukraine, which it invaded in February 2022. Both Moscow and Pyongyang deny the accusations, but vowed last year to deepen military relations.
The debris from a missile that landed in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv on Jan. 2 was from a North Korean Hwasong-11 series ballistic missile, UN sanctions monitors told a Security Council committee in a report seen by Reuters on Monday.

LONDON: Britain’s foreign secretary recommended that the UK continue selling arms to Israel just days after an Israeli strike on a World Central Kitchen convoy killed three British aid workers.

David Cameron supported the continuation of arms sales two days after the strike on April 1, and the Secretary of State for Business and Trade Kemi Badenoch approved the decision on April 8, The Guardian reported on Thursday.

Cameron said earlier this week that the strike that killed the Britons, in addition to four aid workers of other nationalities, revealed systemic and personal failures by members of the Israel Defense Forces.

Cameron’s decision seems to have been based on an assessment of Israeli compliance with humanitarian law that did not cover the deaths of the aid workers due to a time lag in the government’s process for deciding if British arms exports were at risk of being used to commit war crimes.

There was a possibility that the business department’s assessment did not cover any incidents after Jan. 28.

An update on the handling of arms export licenses that took into consideration events up until the end of February was prepared, but the British Foreign Office has declined to say if that was included in the advice given to ministers.

Opposition Labour MPs claim the time delay means there is a possibility that no comprehensive ministerial-level assessment of Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza has been made in the last three months.

Lawyers and campaigners who have examined the evidence provided by the Foreign Office have come to the same conclusion.

World Central Kitchen said on Monday it would resume operations in the Gaza Strip, a month after the Israeli airstrike.

Prior to halting operations, WCK had distributed more than 43 million meals in Gaza since October, representing by its own accounts 62 percent of all international nongovernmental aid.