Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has accused the US of seeking to provoke North Korea into stepping up its nuclear missile programme.
He dismissed a call by the American emissary to the UN Security Council to disjoin ties with the North after its most recent ballistic rocket test.
Russia contends sanctions don't work and promoters arrangements.
The US has cautioned that North Korea's administration will be "completely devastated" if war breaks out.
On Wednesday, the North tried its first rocket in two months, saying the mainland US was currently inside striking separation.
Be that as it may, protection specialists have provided reason to feel ambiguous about its capacity to ace the innovation expected to dispatch a rocket conveying a warhead equipped for re-entering the Earth's air.
What exactly did Lavrov say?
Speaking on a visit to the Belarussian capital Minsk, Mr Lavrov asked whether America was actively seeking to destroy North Korea.
"One gets the impression that everything has been done on purpose to make Kim Jong-un snap and carry out further inadvisable actions," he said.
The Americans, he said, "should explain to us all what they're after"."On the off chance that they need to discover a guise for crushing North Korea, as the US agent said at the UN Security Council, at that point let them say it out and out and let the incomparable American authority affirm it."
Calling for new converses with North Korea, Mr Lavrov included: "We have effectively underlined a few times that the press of approvals has basically arrived at an end, and that those resolutions which presented the authorizations ought to have incorporated a prerequisite to reestablish the political procedure, a necessity to recharge talks.
"However, the Americans totally disregard this prerequisite and I look at this as a major mix-up."After China, Russia is one of the few states with which North Korea still has good relations. Both Russia and China wield a veto at the UN Security Council.
What is the US position?
Nikki Haley, the US envoy to the UN, urged all nations to cut diplomatic and trade ties.President Donald Trump asked his Chinese partner, Xi Jinping, to slice off oil supplies toward the North.
"We know the fundamental driver of its [North Korea's] atomic creation is oil," said Ms Haley. "The real provider of that oil is China."
China is a noteworthy partner and North Korea's most essential exchanging accomplice, and Pyongyang is thought to rely upon China for quite a bit of its oil supplies.
Reacting to the US ask for a ban, the Chinese remote service said just that the nation had "constantly actualized full, thorough, genuine and strict resolutions".
Mr Trump utilized another tweet on Thursday morning to decry the North Korean pioneer and provide reason to feel ambiguous about Chinese endeavors to control its partner.
How has the missile threat changed?
The Hwasong 15 missile launched on Wednesday flew higher than any other previously tested by the North before falling in Japanese waters.The legislature says it achieved an elevation of around 4,475km (2,780 miles) - more than 10 times the tallness of the International Space Station.
It says the rocket conveyed a warhead equipped for re-entering the Earth's environment."They have stretched out the range now out to a point that it is difficult to solidly contend that North Korea couldn't have the US eastern seaboard inside its range," Vipin Narang, relate educator of political science at MIT, told the BBC.
Nonetheless, David Wright at the Union of Concerned Scientists brings up in his blog that the rocket is probably going to have conveyed a light taunt warhead and that "implies it would be unequipped for conveying an atomic warhead to this long separation, since such a warhead would be significantly heavier".
In September, North Korea said it had effectively tried an atomic weapon that could be stacked on to a long-extend rocket. It was the nation's 6th atomic test since 2006.