North Korea will stay away from international nuclear disarmament talks, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Friday after visiting the secretive state and pressing Pyongyang to return to the sputtering discussions.

North Korea, which raised regional tensions with a defiant rocket launch earlier this month that was widely seen as a disguised test of a long-range missile, can send satellites into orbit on Russian rockets, Lavrov said after leaving North Korea.

North Korea responded to UN punishment for the launch by saying it would boycott the nuclear talks with Russia, China, Japan, South Korea and the United States as well as restart a plant that makes arms-grade plutonium. "North Korea at this point does not intend to return to the six-party talks," Lavrov told reporters in Seoul.

Lavrov, the first high-level envoy from a global power to visit the reclusive North since after the launch, and South Korean Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan agreed to work together to have North Korea return to the nuclear talks, Yu said at the joint news conference.

North Korea, arguing that it has the right to have a peaceful space program, said it sent a satellite into orbit in the April 5 launch.

Lavrov, who delivered a message from President Dmitry Medvedev to the North's leader, Kim Jong Il, said Russia stood by the UN move to chastise Pyongyang and tighten existing sanctions that limit the North's arms trade and imports. Lavrov did not meet Kim.

While Lavrov was in North Korea, he also attended the opening of a Russian language school at the Pyongyang Institute of Foreign Languages.

"I am sure the Russian Center we are opening today will be one of the best abroad," Lavrov said, noting that it was one of the first opened under the auspices of the state's Russian World foundation, Itar-Tass reported.

The Russian Center occupies an auditorium on the seventh floor in the main institute building, the report said. It has computers, a collection of audio and video materials and a library. Russian is the second most popular foreign language in North Korean schools after English, the report said. (Reuters, MT)