MOSCOW, January 17. /TASS/. The meeting on North Korea in Vancouver does not contribute to efforts to normalize the situation around the Korean Peninsula but only exacerbates it, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday.
"The results of the January 16 meeting in Vancouver outlined in the statement by its co-chairs - the United States and Canada - confirmed our doubts regarding the usefulness of this event," the ministry stressed in a statement. "We regret to state that such events held hastily and adversely affecting the work of tried and tested multilateral formats, do not contribute to the normalization of the situation around the Korean Peninsula, but, on the contrary, exacerbate it."
Moscow is perplexed by the fact that the document mentions Russia and China, "especially taking into account the fact that the two countries’ foreign ministers had not been invited to the meeting where the Korean problem was expected to be discussed." The Russian Foreign Ministry pointed to the words about Moscow’s and Beijing’s ‘importance and special responsibility’ in finding long-term solutions to the problems of the Korean Peninsula. "A reminder that our countries proposed such a solution over the past year urging others to join it," the ministry said.
Roadmap
The Russian Foreign Ministry recalled that the Russian-Chinese roadmap to resolve the North Korean crisis is aimed at finding "mutually acceptable solutions to the entire range of problems exclusively by peaceful political and diplomatic means through scaling down mutual military activities in the subregion, holding direct American-North Korean and inter-Korean negotiations and discussing security issues in Northeast Asia in a wide format."
"No one has offered any alternative to this document. The participants in the Vancouver gathering have not put forward any constructive proposals either."