Russia Wants to Supply Energy to North Korea

Russia is moving to become a major supplier of electricity and gas to North Korea at a time when the supply of nonnuclear energy sources available to that impoverished country is emerging as an important bargaining chip in talks intended to defuse North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. “We are building energy transmission lines to the North Korean border,” Sergei Darkin, governor of Russia’s Pacific Maritime region, said in an interview on Monday. Governor Darkin said that if President Vladimir V. Putin “gives us the task of transmitting energy to North Korea next year, we will be ready to do that.” North Korean negotiators said at the recent talks in Beijing that one price for freezing their nuclear-bomb program would be getting fuel supplies from other nations to provide two million kilowatts of power a year. That is roughly the output that was expected from the two nuclear reactors that were to be built under the 1994 international accord intended to end North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. Full Story