Pyongyang’s decision to seal off its borders with China and Russia — and stringently control the movement on non-citizens in and out of the country — has brought North Korea under an unprecedented degree of isolation.

Indeed, the DPRK’s provision of medical aid to the PRC to assist with the COVID-19 crisis just over a month ago was arguably primarily about soothing Chinese consternation over Pyongyang’s decision to shut its border with the PRC.   

The fact that North Korea has not officially confirmed any cases of the novel coronavirus within its territory is of cold comfort for those concerned with the well-being of North Korea’s citizenry. The dire straits of the DPRK’s medical system are certainly no secret, and do not bode well for the thousands currently being monitored for COVID-19 symptoms.

Beyond the immediate concerns of attending to the needs of a North Korean populace without access to adequate health care, COVID-19 could also have considerable effects on the diplomatic and security environment around the Korean peninsula.

To some extent, it already has.

The novel coronavirus has disrupted the U.S.’s regular springtime combined military exercises with South Korea, which ROK defense minister Jeong Kyeong-doo has insisted will not affect Seoul and Washington’s joint conventional deterrent against North Korea.

While Pyongyang certainly welcomes Seoul and Washington being forced to modify their combined deterrent posture, COVID-19’s effect on the American and South Korean militaries does not constitute a deliberate concession to the DPRK.

As Julia Masterson of the Arms Control Association recently noted, prospects for continued diplomacy between the DPRK and the U.S. are remote at this point.

This reality no doubt comes as a disappointment to China and Russia, who have pushed for the continuation of direct dialogue between Pyongyang and Washington.

Yet while bilateral diplomacy between North Korea and the United States is off the table for now, the COVID-19 crisis may provide Beijing and Moscow with a degree of leverage in subsequent attempts to make the case for sanctions relief for the DPRK.

COVID-19 could also have considerable effects on the diplomatic and security environment around the Korean peninsula

At the risk of oversimplification, there are two basic strands of argumentation over the humanitarian issues in sanctions-related debate and policymaking vis-à-vis North Korea.

Some insist that punitive economic measures exacerbate the humanitarian crisis in the DPRK. In their view, innocent citizens are suffering due to the U.S.-led international sanctions regime.

Others, however, argue that even humanitarian aid to Pyongyang is simply re-directed toward its WMD program. Providers of humanitarian assistance have performed a morally praiseworthy act, but it is the Kim Jong Un regime that thwarts the delivery of humanitarian aid to its intended recipients.

Humanitarian aid has long been a key area of both China-North Korea relations and DPRK-Russia cooperation. China has generally been one of the largest food donors to North Korea, primarily operating within a bilateral framework.

In the first half of 2019, Moscow provided more than half of the funds for humanitarian aid to the DPRK under the aegis of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

The U.S. has only sporadically granted assistance to the DPRK over the past decade, with one notable example being a U.S. $1 million aid package provided by the outgoing Obama administration in January 2017.

Recently, under current circumstances, the UN Sanctions Committee on North Korea has approved providing medical supplies to the DPRK, prompting both praise for the humanitarian benefits as well as warnings over the potential dual-use application to weapons systems.

The United States has also expressed willingness to provide humanitarian assistance to the DPRK to mitigate the potential blowback from a COVID-19 outbreak there.

The Russian government, meanwhile, recently sent 1,500 testing kits to North Korea to help Pyongyang cope with the potential spread of the disease.

Beneath the surface of the U.S.’s current flexibility in allowing for critical medical aid to reach the DPRK and Russia’s recent moves in assisting North Korea’s handling of the COVID-19 outbreak, the novel coronavirus could ultimately sharpen the battle over sanctions relief for the DPRK, with Beijing and Moscow on one side and Washington on the other.

China and Russia, even while voting in favor of UN resolutions and implementing domestic steps to support sanctions against Pyongyang, have long expressed skepticism over their effectiveness.

In 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin asserted that even if North Koreans were reduced to “eating grass” Pyongyang would never give up its WMD deterrent, and that sanctions were basically “useless.”

In December of last year, Beijing and Moscow proposed easing UN sanctions on items such as seafood and textiles, a move that Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations Vasily Nebenzya claimed was strictly humanitarian.

The proposal, which the U.S. summarily rejected, was portrayed as an attempt to jumpstart flagging diplomacy between Pyongyang and Washington.

While various parties may have temporarily come to an agreement — by coincidence — on the need to assist the DPRK in the specific case of managing the COVID-19 crisis, humanitarian aid as a tool of foreign policy necessarily contains political overtones.

According to Russian politician Yevgeny Primakov (grandson of the late Russian foreign minister of the same name), humanitarian aid in the context of Russian foreign policy could develop into yet another means of competition between Moscow and the U.S.

Given the unprecedented level of cooperation between China and the Russian Federation over the DPRK security crisis in recent years, even while both countries have tended to coordinate their humanitarian aid to North Korea separately, Beijing and Moscow will likely attempt to coordinate policy with each other on the nexus between humanitarian concerns and sanctions in light of the outbreak of COVID-19.

If the novel coronavirus considerably affects the DPRK’s humanitarian situation, Beijing and Moscow will most likely draw upon this as a case-in-point justifying sanctions relief.

Barring a major shift in the U.S.’s own policy on punitive economic measures, the fallout from COVID-19 could have a lasting impression on Washington’s interactions with the PRC and Russia over how to proceed in a period of stalled diplomacy from which the novel coronavirus outbreak presents a temporary distraction.

Edited by James Fretwell