Pyongyang, North Korea (CNN) -- At Russia's urging, the U.N. Security Council will hold an emergency meeting Sunday morning aimed at defusing simmering tensions in the Korean peninsula.
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". CNN
