The meeting will take place at 11 a.m. ET on Sunday, a day after Russia had originally wanted to meet, its ambassador to the United Nations Vitaly Churkin said in a statement. Churkin blamed the U.S. delegation -- which this month heads up the security council -- for the one-day delay, adding, "We assume that nothing will happen in the interim that would bring about further aggravation."
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a former prominent U.S. diplomat now in the middle of an unofficial four-day trip meeting with high-level Pyongyang officials, applauded the development as something that could help skirt further military escalation.
"It's a very, very tense situation, a crisis situation," Richardson told CNN's Wolf Blitzer from Pyongyang. "This is when the U.N. Security Council can be most effective."
The former U.S. energy secretary and ambassador to the United Nations said that Russia's leadership on the issue was a positive -- saying he hoped that the council might issue a statement "urging all sides to exercise maximum restraint (and to) cool things down."
Go inside North Korea 
Blitzer: Everyone's trying to avoid war 
Richardson meets N. Korean officials The United States, as well as Russia and Japan, have been key international players in the crisis, and Chinese officials have also conducted a series of high-level talks with North Korean and South Korean officials.
On Saturday, Chinese Foreign Minister Zhang Zhijun reiterated his nation's strong desire to avert war, which he said would be devastating for both Korean nations and the region as a whole, according to state-run news agency Xinhua.
Richardson came to North Korea at the invitation of its top nuclear negotiator as a private citizen -- with the knowledge of but not as a representative of the U.S. government -- amidst one of the region's most serious crises since the 1953 Korean War armistice.
North Korea says that its South Korean counterparts are instigating tensions with planned live military exercises on and around the disputed Yeonpyeong Island. Seoul cited bad weather as its reason for pushing back the drills a day or two, which were originally scheduled between December 18 and 21, South Korea's official Yonhap News Agency reported.
Saying the exercises would be in "the inviolable territorial waters" of North Korea, the North's state-run Korean Central News Agency warned Saturday that its forces "will deal the second and third unpredictable self-defensive blow" if the drills proceed.
Such strikes, according to the agency, would be "deadlier ... in terms of the powerfulness and sphere" than its November 23 shelling of Yeonpyeong Island that left four South Koreans dead.
Noting that North Korea is "very, very provoked by this potential incident," Richardson said he hoped that a strong statement from the United Nations council might spur Seoul to cancel the drills and "give both sides cover" to tamp down their rhetoric and actions.
Deescalating tensions is a main goal of his trip, the governor said. He planned to meet Sunday morning with Maj. Gen. Pak Rim Su, who heads North Korean forces in the demilitarized zone along the South Korean border.
Pak is the first non-political official to meet with Richardson, who earlier said he had a "good meeting" with the North's chief nuclear negotiator Kim Gye Gwan and also met with the vice minister of North Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Friday.
Richardson said he hoped to talk with Pak about setting up some sort of communication between North and South Korean forces. He said he wanted "some kind of mechanism, some kind of hotline (set up) that will hopefully cool things down."
He told Blitzer that he made a series of proposals in Saturday's meeting aimed at easing the crisis. Both Koreas have traded tough talk and conducted aggressive military drills in the weeks after the Yeonpyeong Island incident.
The U.S. military has said it is concerned that South Korea's scheduled exercises could spark an uncontrollable clash with the North, but the State Department said the exercises are not meant to be threatening or provocative.
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擺明就是不會打~
會咬人的狗不會叫 , 一直叫來叫去的狗就是不會咬人...
兩韓肥皂劇不知道要播到何時 XD
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