Last week U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Russia one of the “principal economic enablers of North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile development program,” with “unique and special responsibility for this growing threat to regional and global stability.”

Tillerson is, presumably, referring to Russia’s USD$68 million trade volume with the DPRK (2016 data, down from $92 million in 2014) and the perception in Washington that Russia is not implementing UN sanctions hard enough; it also follows on from recent U.S. unilateral sanctions against Russian entities for their links with the DPRK.

But as