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Nov. 13. (Blue House photo pool)

By Seok Jin-hwan, Blue House correspondent

South Korean President Park Geun-hye and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to work toward resuming the six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear program at a summit meeting on Nov. 13 at the Blue House.

The leaders also exchanged six memoranda of understanding (MOU) for economic cooperation efforts, including South Korean participation in the North Korean-Russian Rajin-Hasan project and collaboration on finance, investment, shipbuilding and transportation, and signed an agreement to offer each other’s citizens visa exemptions on visits shorter than 60 days.

After the summit, Park and Putin held a press conference to release a joint communique saying they had agreed to work with other partners to establish a climate for resuming the six-party talks in line with the goals of the Joint Statement of September 19, 2005.

It also said North Korea had to honor its international pledges and obligations to denuclearize, include the 2005 Joint Statement and United Nations Security Council resolutions.

“The two sides confirmed they cannot accept Pyongyang’s policy of building independent nuclear and missile capabilities . . . and stressed that North Korea cannot have the status of a nuclear state,” the statement said, referencing the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The 2005 Joint Statement emerged from an agreement among the six parties in the talks - South and North Korea, the US, China, Japan, and Russia - to peacefully achieve the goal of a denuclearized Korean Peninsula. Park and Putin’s references to it are significant in demonstrating their agreement on the need for a comprehensive deal for ending North Korea’s nuclear program while guaranteeing its security and building trust between Pyongyang and Washington.

Also noteworthy is the more active stance from Park on the talks’ resumption, after her previous calls for “sincere dialogue” and “credible preliminary steps” from North Korea.

Putin, for his part, said he “agrees with [Park’s] idea of a Korean Peninsula trust-building process and actively supports her efforts to build trust.”

The leaders also agreed to pursue political and security-related dialogue at the senior level and hold regular talks between the Blue House National Security Office and the Security Council of the Russian Federation.

In addressing the common interest of Northeast Asian peace, they expressed concern that cooperation was not taking place because of recent “retrograde acts and words on history” - seen by many as a criticism of Japan’s hard-right lurch.

■ Economic agreements　

The same day, the two countries signed two agreements, including one on visa exemptions, and six MOUs on the Najin-Hasan project and other forms of economic cooperation, with Park and Putin attending.

Also part of the summit’s economic cooperation discussions were nine more MOUs in areas like healthcare, energy development, transportation and construction infrastructure.

Behind the discussions of these plans is the two leaders’ belief in a possible synergy effect between Putin’s New Eurasian policy, part of a longstanding effort to develop Siberia and Russia’s far east, and Park’s “Eurasian initiative,” a program to achieve regional stability and economic development through closer cooperation with Europe and Asia. The idea is that the eastern regions could provide the South Korean economy with a new growth engine, while development of regions either directly connected to or bordering North Korea could encourage reforms and openness from Pyongyang and help bring about Northeast Asian stability - achieving a kind of “three birds with one stone” effect.

Perhaps the most notable economic development was the signing of an MOU for South Korean corporate participation in the Najin-Hasan project, a North Korea-Russia collaboration. Not only would it permit indirect investment in North Korea, but it could also open up a distribution channel to Europe in the medium to long term through the Trans-Siberian Railway (TSR). The two countries also signed an MOU to hold regular transportation minister meetings and step up their cooperation on railways.

Other short-term projects discussed at the summit included collaborating on the completion of orders for liquefied natural gas (LNG) transport vessels - conditioned on the transfer of South Korean shipbuilding technology - and developing a joint investment and finance platform to help South Korean companies enter Russia.

An estimated US$3 billion in financial support could be made available, including a US$1 billion development fund by the state-run Korea Exim Bank and Russia’s Vnesheconombank (VEB).

Plans were also made for Russia to collaborate on allowing South Korean vessels to use Arctic sea routes in its territorial waters or continental shelf region, with the South Korean Ministry of Ocean Fisheries and the Russian Ministry of Transport to work on developing an agreement on Far Eastern port development. Discussions on medium- to long-term plans for building gas pipelines passing through North Korea and power lines supplying Russian electricity to South Korea are also expected to take place.

The Blue House said the agreements to grant mutual 60-day visa exemptions for ordinary passport holders and to discuss establishing cultural centers in each other’s capital cities reflected the hope of promoting smoother economic and cultural exchange and cooperation between the two countries.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]