🇷🇺 Statement by Ambassador-at-Large of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation Andrey Belousov under Agenda Item 18 of the 70th Session of the IAEA General Conference «Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea»

📍Vienna, 17 September 2026

💬 We regret to note that a certain group of Member States has failed to draw any lessons from the last year’s General Conference, when the Russian Federation for the first time called the draft resolution on the DPRK submitted by this group to vote. The sponsors of the document have not only failed to reconsider their politicized approach, but are now also attempting to portray Russia as the party responsible for undermining a long-standing consensus. Let us recall that at the previous session, 22 countries withheld their support for the resolution: 5 voted against it and 17 abstained.

Nevertheless, the co-sponsors continue to insist on using the time of the General Conference to discuss this issue, which, by and large, has already ceased to have any substantive bearing on the IAEA’s mandate. The sole purpose pursued by the co-sponsors is to have the General Conference endorse an entirely false and reality-detached narrative of the situation surrounding the DPRK, according to which Pyongyang is portrayed as responsible for developments on the Korean Peninsula and in the adjacent region. We consider such use of the Agency’s policy-making organ inappropriate, harmful and destructive.

As for the role of the IAEA, there has been no Agency inspectors' presence at nuclear facilities in the DPRK since 2009. Without conducting verification activities, the IAEA cannot draw any reliable conclusions regarding the state of the country’s nuclear infrastructure. The Director General makes this clear in his latest report. The information used by the Agency’s Secretariat is based solely on information derived from satellite imagery and open sources, the completeness and reliability of which remain subject to serious questions. Yet the group of countries actively promoting the IAEA General Conference resolution against the DPRK is manipulating these fragmentary and, in many respects, questionable data in order to intensify political and, even more disturbingly, military pressure on Pyongyang. We consider the adoption of such a resolution to be inconsistent with the purposes, objectives and status of the IAEA, as well as detrimental to the authority of the Agency.

In the Agency’s policy-making organs, Russia is being criticized for failing to contribute to the goal of the «denuclearization of the DPRK». In order to understand who bears responsibility for the current situation on the Korean Peninsula, it is important to recall that the objective of denuclearization — and I emphasize, of the entire Korean Peninsula, rather than the DPRK alone, as our colleagues claim — was established in 1992 by the DPRK and the Republic of Korea. This objective has always comprised two key elements: first, Pyongyang would give up its nuclear ambitions; and second, the United States would de-escalate military tensions on the Peninsula and cease threatening the DPRK. For Washington, fulfilling its part of the arrangement has proved to be an insurmountable task.

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In light of the foregoing, we consider the draft resolution proposed by the group of co-sponsors to be entirely inappropriate and harmful. It does nothing to help creation a constructive environment for the possible launch of negotiations on a comprehensive political and diplomatic settlement of the situation on the Korean Peninsula.

❗️The Russian Federation opposes politicized steps and initiatives that lead to further discrediting of the Agency. We are calling for the draft resolution on the DPRK to be put to a vote and will vote against it. We call upon other delegations that recognize the harmful nature of this document to withhold their support for it.

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