According to Russia's former deputy foreign minister and now a leading research fellow at the Center for Asia Pacific Studies (IMEMO), Georgy Kunadze, the international community has no idea of how to influence North Korea and force it to stop its nuclear activities.
"No one knows what to do with them [with North Korea]. If one toughens the sanctions to the maximum, then at some point the North Koreans will grow hungry and finally give up. But it is quite a difficult moral choice — to make 20 million people starve only to influence the inadequate government," Kunadze told Sputnik.
Earlier, on August 29 a group of South Korean law-makers suggested considering the possibility of placing nuclear submarines in the waters near the country in order to counter North Korea.
"There has been no solution made so far, but since there is a vivid debate about the necessity of such step, the Ministry of Defense will consider this issue," Defense Minister of South Korea Han Ming Gu stated.
South Korea, Japan and the United states called on the United Nations to hold a crisis meeting to address North Korea's nuclear ambition. The emergency meeting of the UN Security Council is expected to take place later on Friday.
"By now it has become clear that the sanctions have not had a noticeable effect on the state of the North Korean economy. So there is reason to believe that a new round of international sanctions — the most serious in the history of North Korea — would fail in the same way as the previous one," political analyst and professor Kookmin University in Seoul Andrei Lankov believes.
Lankov also argued that the sanctions are unlikely to reach their main goal, which is to force the North Korean leadership to abandon nuclear weapons, and would only negatively affect the country's population.
"Most likely, this goal is now unattainable in principle, but the international community can't recognize this sad fact and does not want to do it," the expert concluded.
