Moscow ? Chinese President Hu Jintao and Russian President Vladimir Putin, meeting Tuesday in the Kremlin, urged North Korea to relinquish its nuclear ambitions and keep the Korean peninsula free of nuclear weapons.

Their joint declaration, which also pressed for a central U.N. role in rebuilding Iraq, came during Hu’s first trip abroad as leader of China, North Korea’s main ally.

“The parties stand for ensuring a nuclear-free status of the Korean Peninsula and observing the regime of nonproliferation of mass destruction weapons,” the declaration said.

The statement marked the first time Moscow and Beijing spoke with one voice to call on North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program. Russia has in the past urged North Korea to stop development of such weapons, as has China — which last month coaxed its reclusive neighbor into talks it hosted on the issue with the United States.

But the two leaders also expressed support for the North’s demand for security guarantees, and spoke of the need to create “favorable conditions for socio-economic development” of the isolated communist state.

“Any scenarios of forceful pressure or use of force for solving the existing problems are unacceptable,” the declaration said.

Hu chose Russia for his first trip abroad after replacing Jiang Zemin as president in March in a long-planned succession.

Russian officials have stressed they expect Hu to carry on the course of Jiang, who in 2001 signed a friendship treaty with Putin — the first such document since 1950, when Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong created a Soviet-Chinese alliance that slid into rivalry and then hostility in the 1960s.

“Relations between Russia and China have reached their highest level ever,” Putin said at the start of talks Tuesday.

Hu, who visited Putin’s home outside Moscow after his arrival Monday, said that he highly valued their new “personal friendship.”