MOSCOW. Sept 9 (Interfax) - Moscow regrets that the issue of North Korea's nuclear program is being politicized without sufficient technical and professional grounds for that, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told Interfax on Thursday.
"We regret that the issue of the North Korean nuclear program is again being politicized now in the bad sense of the word. We see attempts to kind of pump terms and assessments into documents of different sorts, but at the same time, without sufficient professional and technical grounds for that. We highly respect the work of the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] in all fields. We always keep in touch with the secretariat and the administration of this organization," Ryabkov said when asked by Interfax to comment on the IAEA's recent report which says that North Korea may have resumed the production of fuel for nuclear weapons at the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center in July 2021.
"On a broader scale, we presume that today, it would be important to focus on how we can give practical impetus to political work aimed at achieving the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula as the ultimate goal," Ryabkov said.
"The administration has changed in the U.S. The new administration's approaches to this issue obviously differ somewhat from those of the [Donald] Trump administration," he said.
"It is necessary to work on the political track. And we stand ready for such work, including for contacts. But trying to exert excess, unnecessary, uncalled for pressure on Pyongyang exactly at this current sensitive period is probably not a path that will help accomplish the main task, i.e., relaunch dialogue on this matter," Ryabkov said.