Speaking at the BRICS summit in China on Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said further sanctions against North Korea “would now be useless and ineffective,” because “they will eat grass but they will not turn away from the path that will provide for their security.”
In a phone call on Wednesday evening, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that applying further sanctions against North Korea would be “counterproductive and dangerous.”
South Korea’s National Intelligence Service told a closed-door session of Parliament on Monday that signs of activity have been detected at North Korea’s Punggye-ri underground nuclear test site, possibly signaling that a new nuclear test is imminent.
A Japanese magazine called Nikkei Asian Review reported this week that North Korea’s chilly relations with its longtime patron China are due, in part, to a Chinese plan that would have eliminated North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and replaced him with his half-brother Kim Jong-nam.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Treasury Department announced a new round of sanctions against Chinese and Russian individuals and corporate entities for supporting North Korea’s nuclear bomb and missile programs.
The United States and South Korea began the first stage of their regularly scheduled joint military exercise on Monday. This was followed by North Korea’s regularly scheduled threat of nuclear war if the drills proceed as planned.
North Korea’s ability to acquire banned technology in defiance of sanctions has long been recognized as a serious problem, but according to a new report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the “astounding progress” in North Korean missile technology over the past two years is largely based on Russian rocket engine technology.
Author Michael Malice joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Tuesday’s Breitbart News Daily to talk about the experiences in North Korea that informed his book “Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il.”
Amid hopeful signs that North Korea is backing away from its threat to launch missiles at Guam, one piece of data from the impenetrable communist state remains troubling: dictator Kim Jong-un has not been seen in public for about two weeks.
Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson co-authored a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Monday titled, “We’re Holding Pyongyang to Account.” The secretaries argue that the Trump administration is using a “peaceful pressure campaign” to achieve the “complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and a dismantling of the regime’s ballistic missile programs.”
North Korea’s patrons in Beijing appear paralyzed by conflicting strategic priorities during the current crisis, although the Communist Party organ Global Times did publish an editorial declaring that China would remain neutral if North Korea starts a war but intervene on North Korea’s behalf if the U.S. and South Korea attempt a preemptive strike.
Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton proposed reunification as the solution to the North Korean nuclear missile crisis on Friday’s Breitbart News Daily with SiriusXM host Alex Marlow.
President Trump’s warning that North Korean threats would be met with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” triggered paroxysms of nuclear war anxiety among many in the mainstream media. Instead of sober analyses of the military situation with North Korea, we got “OMG TRUMP IS GOING TO BLOW UP THE WORLD” hysteria.
Guam is suddenly the focus of intense media attention after North Korea ostentatiously threatened to attack it with missiles. The governor of Guam, Eddie Calvo, backed President Donald Trump’s warning to rain “fire and fury” on North Korea in a Fox News interview on Wednesday night.
