The handful of foreign aid organizations still working inside North Korea are navigating an increasingly complex operating environment under the byzantine tangle of multilateral sanctions currently in place, according to three separate internal European Union documents reviewed by NK News.

In one - the minutes from a 25 April meeting in Brussels of NGOs that have resident North Korean offices - a European Commission policy officer conceded that the “mixed regime of heavily intertwined sanctions by EU and UN make implementation and particularly requests for derogations complicated.” There are no U.S. charities resident in Pyongyang at this time.