Russia resumes oil shipments to North, possibly for weapons

Russia officially resumed shipments of refined oil to North Korea in December last year according to the United Nations Security Council website on Tuesday, highlighting growing cooperation between the two countries.

North Korean Leader Kim Jong-un, left and Russia's President Vladimir Putin toast each other at a reception following Russian-North Korean talks at the Far Eastern Federal University on Russky Island on April 25, 2019. [YONHAP]

Russia officially resumed shipments of refined oil to North Korea in December last year according to the United Nations Security Council website on Tuesday, highlighting growing cooperation between the two countries as they both face international isolation.

Data posted on the council website shows that Russia exported a total of 67,300 barrels of refined oil to the North from December to April.

The majority of that amount — 44,655 barrels — was shipped to the North in January.

Russia had not reported shipments of refined oil to the North for 28 months after shipping 255 barrels in August 2020.

Experts interviewed by Radio Free Asia (RFA) said they believe Russia shipped oil to the North in return for weapons it received to support its invasion of Ukraine.

Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the U.S.-based think tank Brookings Institute, told RFA that it was possible that Moscow was paying Pyongyang in refined oil in exchange for weapons.

Oil-for-weapons exchanges would be mutually beneficial for Russia and North Korea, which both face challenges in fulfilling their present military and economic needs due to multilateral and international sanctions.

United Nations Security Council Resolution 2397, which was adopted in 2017 after the North’s sixth nuclear weapons test, requires all United Nations member states to report supplies, sales and transfers of all refined petroleum products to North Korea.

The resolution also set a cap of 500,000 barrels on the total amount of refined oil that can be exported to North Korea each year, which is far below Pyongyang’s energy needs.

Russia’s reported shipments from December to April make up approximately 19 percent of the total amount of oil that the North can import under the current international sanctions regime.

Russia for its part has been subject to a $60 price cap on its oil and petroleum products since September as part of multilateral sanctions intended to limit its ability to bankroll its war machine in Ukraine.

Russia could sidestep such constraints by supplying oil-starved North Korea with fuel in exchange for weapons.

Refined oil shipments reported by Russia to the United Nations are also likely an underestimate of the actual amount making its way to the North.

Pyongyang is known to have previously evaded sanctions on its oil supplies through various means, including ship-to-ship transfers on open seas.

Unreported oil transfers constitute a violation of international sanctions.

On June 6, a Singaporean court sentenced a 40-year-old man to six months imprisonment for attempting to cover up a vessel’s involvement in transferring marine gas oil to a North Korean vessel.

Jeremy Koh Renfeng, who was a former cargo officer of the Singapore-flagged MT Sea Tanker II, was found guilty of obstructing justice by providing false information in the ship’s official log book and dumping a computer’s central processing unit into the sea in order to hide the vessel’s gas oil transfers to North Korean-flagged vessels in 2018.

In January, the South Korean Coast Guard arrested a Chinese oil broker on suspicion of organizing illegal transfers of diesel from South Korea to the North.

The broker, a naturalized South Korean citizen, allegedly supplied 19,000 tons of diesel to the North on a total of 35 occasions from October 2021 to January 2022.

Coast Guard officials said the suspect used a Russian oil tanker operated by a South Korean oil company to conduct ship-to-ship fuel transfers with a Chinese vessel in the South China Sea.

The Chinese ship then conducted ship-to-ship transfers with a North Korean ship.

Officials from the Chinese shipper received payment from North Korea and transferred it to the Chinese oil broker’s bank account, the Coast Guard said.

BY MICHAEL LEE [lee.junhyuk@joongang.co.kr]