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Wednesday, March 2, 2022
On Monday, the Foreign Affairs Ministry of North Korea released a statement blaming the United States and the West for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began last Thursday.
In the country’s first official statement on the issue, a ministry spokesperson said that Western “high-handedness and arbitrariness”, eastward NATO enlargenment, its weapon system installments and continued neglect of Russian demands for security guarantees led to the conflict. The statement was a reply to questions from the state-owned Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
The ministry first responded to the situation on Saturday, when its website released an article blaming the US and its “vassal forces” for “shaking international peace and stability”. The article, by Ri Ji Song, a Society for International Politics Study researcher, named NATO’s expansion in Europe as a reason behind the crisis and a “grave threat to the national security of Russia.” Ri concluded Western involvement, as like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the color revolutions, sow the “seeds of discord”, and “the relations between the states deteriorate.”
Park Won-gon, a professor of Ewha Womans University specializing in North Korea, told Agence France-Presse the article was a “low-key” response, because it appeared under Ri’s name.