AFP
Wednesday, January 31, 2007

North Korea's nuclear weapons capability threatens Russian interests, Moscow's chief negotiator at international talks with Pyongyang said Wednesday, warning the isolated Stalinist state against carrying out another military test.

"If the absence of a nuclear weapon on the Korean peninsula is in our interests, and one of the countries located there declares that it has become a nuclear power, it means that our interests are under threat," Alexander Losyukov was quoted as saying by Interfax news agency.

He cautioned North Korea against a repeat of last October's atomic bomb test. "I think a very negative reaction would follow another test and that tougher measures would probably be taken," he said.

Losyukov spoke ahead of February 8 talks in Beijing -- involving China, Japan, South and North Korea, Russia and the United States -- to try to persuade North Korea to give up its military nuclear programme.

He said that although "concrete" results were unlikely in Beijing, "it could be possible to lay out quite precisely the route toward achieving them."

Reflecting the growing flurry of diplomatic activity, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met in Moscow with his South Korean counterpart Song Min-Soon to discuss "resolving the nuclear problem on the Korean peninsula," Interfax reported.

South Korea's negotiator to the six-nation talks, Deputy Minister Chun Young-Woo, was due to also meet with Losyukov in Moscow on Thursday to discuss a "road map" plan for resolving the standoff with North Korea, ITAR-TASS reported.

The last round of talks in China in December ended in deadlock after Pyongyang demanded the lifting of US sanctions imposed for alleged money laundering and counterfeiting.

The talks have continued intermittently since 2003, but gained new urgency when North Korea conducted an atomic test in October last year.

Earlier this week Losyukov expressed "cautious optimism," saying that "simply the agreement to hold a new round shows that encouraging signs have appeared regarding the movement of different participants' positions."

He repeated this Wednesday, adding that both North Korea and the United States, the two countries most at loggerheads, were "now coming out with the biggest optimism."

However he tempered this with warnings about the effect of negotiations dragging on for too long with too little result.

"I personally think that this (weapon) test very much complicated the situation in the region and set back the process of the six-sided talks. The result is that we lose time and the process of nuclearisation on the peninsula goes further."