North Korea has decried the latest United States sanctions targeting cybercrimes that the US says help finance its nuclear weapons programme.
It accused Washington of harbouring “wicked” hostility towards Pyongyang and promising unspecified countermeasures.
North Korea’s Vice Minister for US Affairs at the Foreign Ministry, Kim Un Chol, said in a statement, “Recently, the new US administration has imposed its exclusive sanctions on the DPRK, the fifth of their kind since its assumption of office.”
Kim asserted that the present US administration expresses its “invariable hostile intention towards the DPRK again in an accustomed and traditional way.”
DPRK refers to North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
The statement by North Korea’s Vice Minister for US Affairs at the Foreign Ministry came two days after the US Department of the Treasury imposed sanctions on eight people and two firms, including North Korean bankers, for allegedly laundering money from cybercrime schemes.
The US Treasury accused North Korea of operating state-sponsored hacking schemes that have stolen more than $3bn in mostly digital assets over the past three years, an amount unmatched by any other foreign actor. The Treasury Department said the illicit funds helped finance the country’s nuclear weapons programme.
The department said that North Korea relies on a network of banking representatives, financial institutions and shell companies in North Korea, China, Russia and elsewhere to launder funds obtained through IT worker fraud, cryptocurrency heists and sanctions evasion.
The sanctions were rolled out even as US President Donald Trump continues to express interest in reviving talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Their nuclear discussions during Trump’s first term collapsed in 2019 amid disagreements over trading relief from US-led sanctions on North Korea for steps to dismantle its nuclear programme.
Sanctions To Have No Effect On Situation Between North Korea, US
In his statement, Kim emphasized that US sanctions and pressure tactics will never change the “present strategic situation” between the two countries or alter North Korea’s “thinking and viewpoint.”
He also repeatedly underscored the futility of using US sanctions as a policy tool, describing it as the behavior of “expecting a new outcome while following the old script of the failed past.”
North Korea also reaffirmed its action-for-action principle toward sanctions, dimming prospects for resurrecting dialogue with the US.
“Now that the present US administration has clarified its stand to be hostile towards the DPRK to the last, we will also take proper measures to counter it with patience for any length of time.”
Kim Un Chol
Kim Jong Un has shunned any form of talks with Washington and Seoul since his fallout with Trump in 2019.
He has since made Russia the focus of his foreign policy, sending thousands of soldiers, many of whom have died on the battlefield, and large amounts of military equipment for President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine while pursuing an increasingly assertive strategy aimed at securing a larger larger role for North Korea in a united front against the US-led West.
In a recent speech, Kim Jong Un urged Washington to drop its demand for the North to surrender its nuclear weapons as a condition for resuming diplomacy.
He ignored Trump’s proposal to meet while the US President was in South Korea last week for meetings with world leaders attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.
Lim Eul-chul, a Professor at Kyungnam University’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies, opined that North Korea appeared to exercise a degree of restraint by issuing a statement through a Vice Foreign Minister.
However, the Professor added that the statement represents North Korea’s official position that further diminishes the possibility of resuming dialogue or negotiations with Washington.
