 "Vladimir Putin is making a rare visit to North Korea. Here’s what we can expect")
Russia’s Vladimir Putin will visit North Korea today – his first trip to the Hermit Kingdom in 24 years.
This comes after North Korea’s Kim Jong-un extended an invitation to Putin during a visit to Russia in September.
“At the invitation of the Chairman of State Affairs of the DPRK, Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin will pay a friendly state visit to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea on June 18-19,” the Kremlin announced.
This will be Putin’s second visit to North Korea.
He first visited the secretive nation in July 2000 – in the first year of his presidency – where he met Kim Jong-Il, the father of Kim Jong-un.
The meeting comes just days after a slew of world leaders including Prime Minister Narendra Modi congregated in Italy for the G7 Summit.
Putin in May made a state visit to China.
But what do we know about the ties between the two nations? And what can we expect from Putin’s visit to North Korea?
Let’s take a closer look:
History of ties
Communist North Korea was formed in the early days of the Cold War with the backing of the Soviet Union. North Korea later battled the South and its U.S. and United Nations allies to a stalemate in the 1950-1953 Korean War with extensive aid from China and the Soviet Union.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsNorth Korea was heavily reliant on Soviet aid for decades, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s contributed to a famine in the North.
Pyongyang’s leaders have often tried to use Beijing and Moscow to balance each other. Kim, who came to power in 2011, initially had a relatively cool relationship with Russia and China, which both joined the United States in imposing strict sanctions on North Korea over its nuclear tests.
Russia has since joined China in opposing new sanctions on North Korea, blocking a US-led push and publicly splitting the UN Security Council on the issue for the first time since it started punishing Pyongyang in 2006.
In March, Russia blocked the annual renewal of a panel of experts monitoring enforcement of longstanding UN sanctions against North Korea over its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programmes.
After his country’s most recent nuclear test in 2017, Kim took steps to repair ties and he met Putin in 2019 for the first time in the Russian city of Vladivostok.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, North Korea has reciprocated with public support for Moscow
It was one of the only countries to recognise the independence of Russian-claimed Ukrainian regions, and it expressed support for Russia’s annexation of parts of Ukraine.
In September last year, Putin welcomed Kim to the Vostochny space launch facility in Russia’s far east and promised to help North Korea build satellites, among other vows of cooperation and support.
Underlining the deepening ties, then Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu visited Pyongyang in July 2023 and toured a weapons exhibit that included the North’s banned ballistic missiles. He later stood beside Kim and saluted those missiles as they rolled by during a military parade.
Since Kim and Putin met last year there has been a steady stream of delegations between the two countries on everything from forestry and agriculture to zoos and culture.
What can we expect?
CNN quoted Russian state media as saying the Kremlin has said it hopes to build a partnership with North Korea “in all possible areas.”
Meanwhile, Kim last week in a message to Putin on Russia’s national day toasted the future of the countries’ “meaningful ties and close comradeship.”
“Our people give full support and solidarity to the successful work of the Russian army and people,” Kim said, according to the Rodong Sinmun newspaper.
The two countries have an “unbreakable relationship of comrades-in-arms,” Kim added.
More specifically, the countries are likely to discuss munitions.
The US and others have accused North Korea of transferring weapons to Russia for use against Ukraine.
The debris from a missile that landed in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv on 2 January was from a North Korean Hwasong-11 series ballistic missile launched from Russian territory, UN sanctions monitors told a Security Council committee in a report seen by Reuters.
The Economist has quoted American officials as claiming that North Korea has given Russia around 11,000 arms-filled containers since September.
Kim at the time met Putin in Vladivostok.
These include as many as five million rounds of artillery shells and Hwasong-11 class ballistic missiles.
Pyongyang sent around 6,700 containers which could hold over three million rounds of 152 mm artillery shells or in excess of 500,000 rounds of 122 mm multiple rocket launchers from August to February, South Korea’s defence ministry has claimed.
A senior Ukrainian official said that a lot of the arms aren’t good quality, but it has filled in the gap till Russia can increase its own production.
Moscow in turn sent Pyongyang around 9,000 containers since September.
The Hindu quoted satellite images in October 2023 as showing a major surge in freight railcar traffic at the Tumangang rail facility near the North Korea-Russia border.
North Korea wants nuclear weapons designs, re-entry vehicles for intercontinental ballistic missiles and tech related to satellites, submarines and hypersonic weapons.
Spare parts for planes or ships and more modern air defences will be on Kim’s wish list.
However, for now, it is likely that Moscow is sending North Korea food and fuel.
Putin also gave Kim a Russian-made luxury limo, as per The Economist.
The Hindu reported that North Korea and Russia are engaged in talks about collaborating in sensitive areas.
Putin has seemingly offered to help North Korea develop spy satellites.
There is also speculation that Russia, China and North Korea will conduct trilateral naval exercises.
Moscow and Pyongyang have denied the accusations of weapons for food trading, but vowed last year to deepen military relations.
Shoigu told Russian media last year that Moscow was discussing holding joint military exercises with North Korea.
“Why not, these are our neighbours. There’s an old Russian saying: you don’t choose your neighbours and it’s better to live with your neighbours in peace and harmony,” Interfax news agency quoted him as saying.
In 2022 Russia and North Korea restarted train travel for the first time since railway journeys were cut during the COVID pandemic.
The train carried an unusually opulent cargo: 30 thoroughbred horses.
Shortly after that, Russia resumed oil exports to North Korea, UN data shows, the first such shipments reported since 2020.
The vast majority of North Korea’s trade goes through China, but Russia is a potentially important partner as well, particularly for oil, experts said.
Moscow has denied breaking UN sanctions on oil exports to Pyongyang, but Russian tankers have been accused of helping evade caps on exporting oil to North Korea.
Russian officials have openly discussed “working on political arrangements” to employ 20,000 to 50,000 North Korean labourers, despite UN Security Council resolutions that ban such arrangements.
Russian officials and leaders in occupied regions of Ukraine have also discussed the possibility of having North Korean workers help rebuild war-torn areas.
What do experts say?
That it would be a mistake to dismiss growing ties between North Korea and Russia as insignificant.
“It’s a mistake to think about it simply as an arms deal,” Jenny Town of the Stimson Centre, an American think-tank told The Economist.
Pyongyang, the piece argued, plays an important role in Russia’s larger battle with the West.
Some argue that a new Axis of Evil – China, North Korea and Russia – is poised to emerge.
Even if that doesn’t happen, North Korea is primed to take advantage of the showdown between the West and China and Russia.
“It is the biggest strategic opportunity for North Korea since the end of the Cold War,” Ankit Panda of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an American think-tank told The Economist.
Harsh V Pant, writing in The Hindu, argued that Pyongyang could be extremely valuable to Moscow.
“For North Korea, grappling with economic challenges and international sanctions, Russia has emerged as a potential saviour for development in sectors such as energy and transportation, and even in addressing Pyongyang’s chronic food shortages,” Pant wrote.
He noted how infrastructure projects such as the Rajin-Khasan railway – which linked Moscow to the Rajin port – underlined the concrete efforts to bolster economic cooperation.
Pant predicted that ties between the two nations would solidify in 2024.
“This partnership, forged amid common challenges and shared strategic objectives, has far-reaching implications for regional stability and global geopolitics,” Pant wrote. “As such, Russia-North Korea ties represent a notable development in the geopolitical landscape, with ramifications that extend beyond the immediate bilateral relationship.”
Others, however, disagree.
“The new Russian love with North Korea is shallow and artificial,” Andrei Lankov, a Russian expert on North Korea based at Kookmin University in Seoul, told The Economist.
It remains to be seen what twists and turns this friendship takes.
With inputs from agencies
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