At a discussion held at the DPRK Foreign Ministry on May 25, 2009, one participant told Alexander Vorontsov: “Many people around the world contend that we, North Koreans, launched a satellite on April 4 and withdrew from the Six-Party Talks later on in order to draw more attention to ourselves from the international community in general, and Washington in particular. They argue that we wanted to raise the stakes, gain more material benefits and so on. In reality, all such guesses are only ungrounded allegations." In the light of this assertion and closed door conversations, Alexander Vorontsov will discuss the implications of the second North Korean nuclear test from the Russian perspective.

Thursday, July 2, 2009

with

Alexander Vorontsov
Head of the Department for Korean and Mongolian Studies
Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences

About the Presenter
Alexander Vorontsov is head of the department for Korean and Mongolian studies at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Vorontsov also serves as vice secretary general for the International Society for Korean Studies (ISKS) and is a professor at the Military Sciences Academy of the Russian Federation, a leading researcher and instructor at the M.V. Lomonosov State University, and a visiting professor at the Institute for Asian Studies of Osaka University of Economics and Law in Japan. In the past, he served as the second secretary at the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Pyongyang. He was also a visiting professor at the Graduate School of International and Area Studies at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (Seoul, Korea) and a visiting fellow at the Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies of the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. He is a graduate of the executive course of the Honolulu-based Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies.

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