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SEOUL.- This week the president Vladimir Putin visit North Korea to meet for the second time in six months with his peer Kim Jong-unas part of a process of deepening military ties between both countries to reinforce Russia’s war capabilities in Ukraine with North Korean weapons.
Putin was last in North Korea in 2000, when he became the first Russian or Soviet leader to visit the country. This week’s trip starts tomorrow and highlights the growing strategic importance of North Korea to Putin, especially because its ability to supply the conventional weapons that Russia desperately needs for its war adventure in Ukraine.
Kim last met Putin in September last year at the Vostochny Cosmodrome in eastern Russia, a meeting that inaugurated a new era of the bilateral relationship.
For Kim and his country – a pariah in the West – it was a rare opportunity for someone to seek them out as allies. And for Putin, it means strengthening ties with a State that already provides him with the necessary ammunition to keep the combat front active.
Both countries officially confirmed the two-day visit. “At the invitation of Chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the DPRK, Kim Jong-un, Vladimir Putin will pay a state and friendship visit to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea on June 18 and 19,” the Kremlin reported.
Days before Putin’s arrival in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, The Kremlin promised to encourage Russia’s cooperation with North Korea “in all areas.”
Pyongyang and Moscow were allies during the Cold War era, until their relations cooled after the breakup of the Soviet Union. But in the last two years, and based on shared hostility towards the United States, both governments have become closer again: Russia, for its war against Ukraine, and North Korea for its nuclear weapons program.
When the war in Ukraine began to drag on, Russia found itself in urgent need of obtaining conventional weapons, especially artillery shells. And that’s what North Korea has to give. In return, Kim wants to upgrade his weapons systems and Russia has advanced military technologies and other improvements to share.
According to US and South Korean officials, since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, North Korea has sent it thousands of containers of ammunition. And they say that in return Moscow has sent thousands of containers of assistance and other aid.
In the weeks before Putin’s visit, Kim flaunted what he has to offer his Russian counterpart. Last month, he toured the facilities of his country’s munitions factories, praised the increase in weapons production, and showed warehouses full of short-range ballistic missilesaccording to Washington, similar to the North Korean missiles that Russia fired at Ukraine.
Both Moscow and Pyongyang they deny the arms trade, which are prohibited by UN sanctions. But at the G-7 summit in Italy last week, the group’s leaders condemned “in the strongest terms the growing military cooperation” between the two nations, including the export of ballistic missiles by North Korea and the Russia’s use of them against Ukraine.
“What this Putin trip means is that Russia urgently needs North Korean weapons for its war in Ukraine,” South Korean national security adviser Chang Ho-jin told Yonhap News this weekend. TV. “And in return the North Koreans will try to get everything they can from him, because the situation works in their favor.”
Chang said that before Putin’s trip, South Korea had warned Moscow that it “should not cross certain lines,” although he did not give details. But some analysts in South Korea speculate that Kim could take advantage of Putin’s trip to to try to get the Russians to help him upgrade his nuclear weapons and to try to reestablish a Cold War-style military alliance with Moscow.
The outlook was very bleak for Kim, until the war in Ukraine opened up a world of possibilities.
His country’s economy was devastated for years by the sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council to stop the North Korean nuclear weapons program. And in 2019, Kim’s attempt to secure a lifting of sanctions through his direct diplomacy with then-President Donald Trump ended in failure and without a deal.
Kim’s response was to redouble his nuclear weapons program, envisioning a “Neo-Cold War” that would increase his country’s strategic value to China and Russia in Northeast Asia, while the United States, Japan and South Korea expanded their own military cooperation program.
North Korea was one of the few countries that openly supported Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. In return, last year Putin invited Kim to the Vostochny Cosmodrome, where he said Russia was willing to help North Korea launch satellites. Kim needs satellites to better monitor his military targets, but so far he has had trouble getting them into orbit.
During that trip last year to Russia, Kim toured sensitive Russian space and military facilitiesand at one point toasted Putin for what he called “his sacred fight” against the “evil gang” of the West.
UN agreements prohibit Russia from providing North Korea with military equipment, but the decision to host Kim at high-tech facilities that make rockets and fighter jets helped Russia show off the type of technology that North Korea North has long coveted as part of its confrontation with the United States and its allies.
Faced with an avalanche of sanctions and international pressure over his invasion of Ukraine, Putin has strengthened relations with US adversaries around the world, includings Iran, North Korea and Syria, which implies that the challenge for Washington already exceeds the European framework.
For the United States and its allies, this increasingly close bond between Pyongyang and Moscow has security implications. Defense experts say North Korean battlefield use of missiles in Ukraine, for example, may provide North Korea with very valuable data on the performance of those weapons against Western missile defense systems.
On the other hand, that approach also conspires against international efforts to strangle Kim’s ability to earn foreign currency through illicit activities.
By Choe Sang-Hun
Translation of Jaime Arrambide
