Yoon condemns Russia-N. Korean illegal military cooperation

While attending at the East Asia Summit (EAS) held in Vientiane, Laos on Friday, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol criticized the illegal military cooperation between Russia and North Korea, which is prolonging the war in Ukraine, is a confrontation to the UN Security Council resolution. Yoon also pointed out that freedom of navigation and overflight must be guaranteed over the South China Sea according to relevant international laws, including the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Such remarks directly addressed the highly sensitive issues of Russia-North Korea military cooperation and the South China Sea, both of which Russia and China are particularly sensitive to, with the delegations of respective nations in presence. The EAS has 18 Indo-Pacific member states, including 10 Asian states, the Republic of Korea (South Korea), China, and Russia.

President Yoon, who participated in the EAS for the third consecutive year, stressed the need for reinforced solidarity to preserve a rules-based international order in response to such illegal military collaboration. Condemning North Korean nuclear provocations that escalate tensions in the region, Yoon noted that the actions by North Korea that threaten the same ethnic group in South Korea with nuclear weapons and oppress the livelihoods and human rights of its own people for the sole purpose of regime survival would put not only Northeast Asia but the entire Indo-Pacific region in danger, and further added that a joint response is needed to North Korean nuclear provocations. Yoon asserted that the North must be denuclearized for the Indo-Pacific region to prosper freely and peacefully, emphasizing that the global community should demonstrate that it will not tolerate nuclear development nor provocations by the North.


Na-Ri Shin journari@donga.com