According to Press TV, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said during a Friday joint press conference with his visiting Chinese counterpart Wang Yi that North Korea’s missile tests should not become a pretext for the US to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system in South Korea.

“We are going to expose the absolutely invalid nature of such plans, which undermine global [military] parity and strategic stability,” Lavrov said.

“We believe it to be essential not to shelter behind the excuse that this [deployment] is taking place because of the North Korean reckless ventures,” he noted, adding that such plans exceed “all imaginable” threats from Pyongyang.

The Chinese foreign minister, for his turn, emphasized that the two sides share a strongly negative attitude toward the planned deployment.

“We stand firmly against the deployment of the THAAD missile defense system to South Korea under the pretext of the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula,” Wang said. “We believe this to be directly damaging to Russian and Chinese strategic security.”

ME