North Korea has released a new propaganda video showing U.S. soldiers and President Barack Obama burning in the flames of a nuclear blast.

The footage was uploaded on YouTube on Monday, two weeks after a separate video that showed New York city in flames after an apparent missile attack.

South Korea faces "final destruction" if Seoul and its allies continue to push for tougher U.N. resolutions against North Korea's nuclear program, Pyongyang warned Tuesday.

"We have never recognized the propagandist resolutions on sanctions by the U.N. Security Council," North Korean envoy Jon Yong Ryong told a session of the U.N. Conference on Disarmament.

The European Union agreed a raft of new sanctions on Monday against North Korea in retaliation for the country's nuclear test last week, EU officials said.

The measures range from financial measures to travel bans and asset freezes against individuals.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry finally talked Sunday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who had been unavailable for days after the North Korean nuclear test, the State Department said.

The two spent about a half an hour on the phone talking about the situation in Syria and the North Korean test, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.

North Korean defectors in the South launched 200,000 anti-Pyongyang leaflets across the tense inter-Korean border on Saturday, the birth anniversary of the North's late leader Kim Jong-Il.

The defectors used gas-filled balloons to float the leaflets along with $1 currency notes across the western border town of Imjingak, despite high tensions owing to the North's third nuclear test on Tuesday.

The European Union plans a gamut of 'tough' sanctions against North Korea, ranging from financial measures to travel bans and asset freezes against individuals, EU diplomats said Friday.

"There will be wide sanctions", announced at talks between the bloc's 27 foreign ministers Monday, said an EU diplomat speaking on condition of anonymity.

Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will hold talks with U.S. President Barack Obama in Washington on February 22, with North Korea high on the agenda, the top government spokesman said Friday.

Abe will leave Tokyo next Thursday on a four-day U.S. visit, accompanied by Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida, who is planning to meet new U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told a news briefing.

North Korea can never be made to abandon its nuclear weapons program, South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak said Friday, arguing that only regime collapse could remove the threat from Pyongyang.

As the U.N. Security Council continues to debate how to punish the North for its latest nuclear test, the outgoing president suggested the best way forward was to try to foment unrest among the North Korean people.

More than 100,000 troops and civilians staged a mass rally in Pyongyang to celebrate North Korea's nuclear test and praise the "matchless" bravery of leader Kim Jong-Un, state media said Friday.

The rally in the capital's sprawling Kim Il-Sung square on Thursday was attended by top party and military officials, as well as police workers and students, the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.

Two days after North Korea's nuclear test, South Korea touted Thursday the deployment of a new cruise missile capable of hitting targets in the North "anywhere, at any time.”

The defense ministry called in reporters for a special video presentation of the recently deployed missile being fired from a warship and a submarine.