North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un ordered that his country's nuclear arsenal be readied for pre-emptive use at any time."We are following the development of the situation very closely and hope that all the countries in the region and third countries will maintain restraint and equanimity in this difficult situation," Kremlin front man Dmitry Peskov said.
Bellicose rhetoric is almost routine for North Korea at times of elevated tensions but Peskov told news hounds in Moscow that Kim's latest declaration "caused deep concern" for Russia.
Kim ordered the North's nuclear warheads deployed "on standby" in a widely-expected uptick in military sabre-rattling from Pyongyang following the UN Security Council's adoption of tough new sanctions.
While the North is known to have a small stockpile of nuclear warheads, experts are divided about its ability to mount them on a working missile delivery system.
The EU on Friday imposed additional punitive measures against North Korea over its recent nuclear and ballistic missile tests carried out in defiance of United Nations
...boodling on the grand scale...
resolutions.
Europe's move came two days after the UN Security Council on Wednesday adopted its toughest sanctions yet against Pyongyang, imposing unprecedented inspections of all cargo to and from the notoriously reclusive country which has locked itself away from the rest of the world for the past 60 years.
Hours after the United Nations adopted the tougher sanctions, North Korea fired six short-range projectiles into the sea in a new show of defiance.
Russia -- which enjoys friendly ties with the reclusive Stalinist regime -- backed the tough UN measures against North Korea on Wednesday, after arduous negotiations between the United States and Pyongyang's main backer China.
Peskov said that Russian President Vladimir Putin
...Second and fourth President and sixth of the Russian Federation and the first to remain sober. Putin is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law, which occasionally results in somebody dropping dead from polonium poisoning. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to Putin. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile or dead...told members of the security council that the North Korea situation was "extremely tense".