Russia will hold large-scale naval exercises near North Korea next month that were planned before the current stand-off on the Korean peninsula, naval officials said today.
Tensions between the two Koreas are at their highest level in years, a week after international investigators accused the North of torpedoing a South Korean warship in March, killing 46 sailors.
Moscow, which maintains ties with North Korea, has issued repeated calls for calm and restraint from both sides to prevent tension from bubbling over into armed conflict.
The Kremlin says it wants more information about the accusations that a North Korea torpedo sank the warship.
A flotilla of warships will set off for the Sea of Japan from Vladivostok, the home port of Russia's Pacific fleet, its spokesman Roman Martov said. Vladivostok is in the Primorsky Krai, the only Russian region that borders North Korea.
For the first time, other fleets of Russia's navy will also join in the war games.
The Black Sea fleet's flagship Moskva missile cruiser, dubbed "the aircraft carrier killer" in the Russian media, will take part alongside the heavy nuclear-powered cruiser Peter the Great, flagship of the Northern fleet.
Martov did not say whether the planned show of force had any relation to the current precarious stand-off on the Korean peninsula.
The Pentagon has announced plans for a joint US-South Korean anti-submarine drill "in the near future" and said talks are under way on joint maritime interdiction exercises.
"It is business as usual for the (Pacific) fleet," Martov said, without elaborating.
A navy spokeswoman in Moscow said "the exercises had long been planned." She gave no further details.
A permanent member of the UN Security Council, Russia like China has the right to veto any sanctions against North Korea over the sinking.
Next week Russian torpedo experts will fly to South Korea at Seoul's request "to examine material evidence" and say whether the South Korean warship was indeed sunk by a North Korean torpedo in March, Itar-Tass news agency quoted a navy source as saying.
The Kremlin said in a statement yesterday that "if there is veracious information on someone's complicity (in sinking the South Korean corvette), the culprits must be given punishment which is judged necessary and adequate by the international community".
Reuters