MOSCOW, March 30. /TASS/. Russia treats UN Security Council sanctions seriously, but it cannot stand idly by while these measures are being turned into an indiscriminate weapon of punishment of various states, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a commentary regarding the West’s reaction to Russia’s veto against the draft resolution that was supposed to extend the mandate of the Security Council committee for sanctions against North Korea.

"Russia treats the issue of UN Security Council sanctions, which aim to uphold peace and stability, seriously. It complies with the decisions, negotiated by the Council. We cannot stand idly by, when these extreme measures are being turned into an indiscriminate weapon of punishment of certain states. This is exactly what happened within the context of the situation around the Korean Peninsula. It is clearly visible that endless sanctions are completely useless for achievement of the stated goals, but lead to a financial and economic blockade of an entire state with all corresponding consequences for the population," the diplomat noted.

According to Zakharova, the aggressive reaction of the US and certain other Western states to the Russian veto "was unsurprising," because the mentioned international actors "invested a lot into this monitoring instrument, and hoped to keep using it to solve their own geopolitical tasks of anti-Pyongyang nature."

"The goal of the operation of the group of experts, which cannot be called independent and unbiased, was not to uphold international and regional security, but to compromise Pyongyang and to discredit DPRK’s friends," the spokeswoman underscored. "The UN has been unable to properly research the scale of the strike that the UN Security Council sanctions inflict on common people directly or indirectly. The issue of illegal unilateral coercion measures traditionally remained a taboo."

"On our side, we have examined the expert requests scrupulously, and we can say with certainty that most of them had no solid ground. However, not all threat the interaction with the experts as diligently. Otherwise, it could have long been possible to reveal and eliminate the channels of weapons smuggling to Haiti," Zakharova continued. "We expect that the story involving the expert group on DPRK will be a good lesson, and the UN will start getting rid of its dependence on its American puppeteers.".