UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The U.N. Security Council was scheduled to vote late Monday on a new, watered-down sanctions resolution against North Korea that eliminates initial U.S. demands to ban all oil imports to the country and freeze international assets of the government and its leader Kim Jong Un. The United Nations Security Council unanimously stepped up sanctions against North Korea on Monday over the country’s sixth and most powerful nuclear test on Sept. 3, imposing a ban on the country’s textile exports and capping imports of crude oil, Reuters reported. The resolution, aimed at curbing the regime’s nuclear ambitions, imposes a ban on condensates and natural gas liquids, a cap of 2m barrels a year on refined petroleum products, and a cap on crude oil exports to North Korea at current levels. The sanctions include capping imports of crude oil into North Korea, banning the sale of natural gas to the country and prohibiting the sale of North Korean textiles, the country’s second-biggest export, according to Reuters. Textiles were North Korea’s second-biggest export after coal and other minerals in 2016, totaling $752 million, according to data from the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency. Britain’s U.N. ambassador, Matthew Rycroft, told reporters who questioned the watering down of the initial U.S. text that “there is a significant prize in keeping the whole of the Security Council united.”

Rycroft called the resolution “a very significant set of additional sanctions,” declaring that “we are tightening the screw, and we stand prepared to tighten it further.”

French Ambassador Francois Delattre said, “We are facing not a regional but a global threat, not a virtual but an immediate threat, not a serious but an existential threat.”

“Make no mistake about it,” he said, “our firmness today is our best antidote to the risk of war, to the risk of confrontation, and our firmness today is our best tool for a political solution tomorrow.”

China and Russia had called for a resolution focused on a political solution to the escalating crisis over North Koreas nuclear program.
The United Nations Security Council approves new sanctions on North Korea, limiting refined petroleum imports and banning textile exports, in response to its recent nuclear test.