Perhaps more than any other country involved in the Six-Party Talks – China included – Russia must take a balanced approach to the two Koreas, a panel of Russian experts told NK News.

The roots of this approach, they indicated, extend back to the Soviet Union’s normalization of relations with Seoul in the early 1990s and subsequent loss of influence over the North. Because of this, they said, neither the North nor the South took Russia’s position seriously during the tumult of the 1990s.

Considerable effort has been expended by Moscow to resume relations with the North – which