 "Russia and North Korea: A tale of a nuclear bromance")
In the past few days, we have been inundated by pictures and videos of a blossoming closeness between a portly middle-aged Asian man and a somewhat long-in-the-tooth older East European man, exhibiting adorable acts that suggest a seemingly endearing and harmless friendship.
They have been seen bonding over animals, gazing at dogs over a rose-covered fence. They fed carrots to horses together and taken turns to drive each other around in a limousine manufactured by the latter’s country, Russia, laughing and joking. A picture of ultimate geniality. Gifts have been exchanged. We have even seen cutesy videos of them waving each other good-bye shyly from the window of an aircraft. So, is this another sweet Hollywood feel-good movie about two men bonding in middle age, or is the truth more sinister?
The reality is that these two men are two of the world’s most powerful and feared heads of state. Kim Jong Un of North Korea and Vladimir Putin, President of Russia. Far from being a harmlessly delightful rendezvous, the two met in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, earlier this week and signed off a strategic partnership defence pact, taking the world by surprise. This has come after several rounds of talks over months, as said by the Kremlin.
This pact seems to be in direct retaliation to the West’s policy of shunning North Korea because of its development of nuclear and ballistic missiles defying UN sanctions and the former’s rumoured supply of high-precision and advanced weapons to Ukraine with permission to use them to target areas inside Russia.
Russia and North Korea have even vowed to help each other in case of a third-party military attack, with Putin also promising to send weapons to North Korea if required. The United States and Ukraine claim that North Korea has already given Russia a notable amount of artillery shells and ballistic missiles, a claim that has since been refuted by the Kremlin.
This has thrown the rest of the world into a frenzy, with people hailing this friendship as the beginning of a new kind of “axis powers”.
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More ShortsThis is no new friendship, though. Russia and North Korea have been pals for a while.
The Soviet Union, or USSR (the predecessor to the Russian Federation), was the first to recognise North Korea, or DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea), on October 12, 1948, right after its declaration as the sole legitimate authority in all of Korea. North Korea was supported by the Soviet Union during the Korean War, and the overarching personality cult around North Korea’s ruling family was heavily influenced by Stalinism.
Friendly relations between the two continued beyond the dissolution of the Soviet Union, with the cooperation again regaining importance after Putin was elected President of Russia in 2000. They also share a border along the lower Tumen River that is 17 km long and was formed in 1860 when Tsar Alexander II acquired Ussuriland from the Quing dynasty in China during the Convention of Peking.
In 2022, North Korea became the first state to recognise the legitimacy of the breakaway states of Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republic in Eastern Ukraine in support of Russia, after which Ukraine ended their diplomatic ties with North Korea. In 2024, North Korea also sent workers to Russia, who were suffering the consequences of a depleted workforce due to the war.
In spite of their obvious camaraderie, Russia and North Korea, though their relationship cannot exactly be termed tumultuous, have had their ups and downs.
Between 1945 and 1948, when Japan’s colonial rule of Korea came to an end with Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, the Korean peninsula was divided into a Soviet-backed North and a US-backed South. In the North, the Soviets installed a guerrilla leader, Kim Il Sung (Kim Jong Un’s grandfather), as the leader.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet Union continued to provide assistance, both financial and military, to North Korea, but relations soured as Kim Il Sung fiercely ejected pro Soviet factions in North Korea in order to establish himself as the indisputed and unchallengeable leader. The King of the North, if you will.
In the 1970s, as tensions increased between the Soviet Union and China, North Korea followed a medial policy that allowed North Korea to leverage the escalating agitations between the two communist giants and extract aid from both.
In the 1980s, once Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union began to reduce aid to North Korea and instead opened dialogue with South Korea, which also started building relations with other communist countries in Eastern Europe, which left North Korea politically and diplomatically somewhat isolated.
During the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union collapsed, North Korea lost its biggest benefactor. Boris Yeltsin’s post-communist government in Russia increasingly started withdrawing its investments in North Korea.
In 1994, after Kim Il Sung’s death, North Korea experienced calamitous famines that killed hundreds of thousands of their citizens.
In the 2000s, once Putin was elected to office in Russia, his agenda was to mend relations with North Korea. Putin visited North Korea in July of the year 2000 to meet Kim Jong Il (the son of Kim Il Sung), and the two deeply criticised the United States and their missile defence plans.
This visit set the tone for a future common agenda to restore friendly relations between the two states and showed the world an alliance against Western capitalism and its powers.
Despite this, in the years to follow in the 2000s, Russia did support UN sanctions against North Korea over their budding nuclear programme.
In 2011–2012, after Kim Jong II’s death and his son Kim Jong Un’s succession as the leader of North Korea, Russia agreed to waive off North Korea’s staggering $11 billion debt.
In 2016–17, following reports of Kim Jong Un’s accelerated nuclear and missile tests, Russia once again supported sanctions against them.
In retaliation to this, Kim Jong Un in 2018 tried to open diplomatic dialogue with the US to leverage his nuclear programme agenda, but after his second meeting with then US President Donald Trump, relations once again became strained over the US’ sanctions on North Korea. After this, Kim Jong Un travelled to Russia in 2019 to once again mend fences and attend his first summit with Putin in the Russian city of Vladivostok.
Relations between the two states only go on to improve in 2022, when Kim Jong Un uses the Russia-Ukraine conflict to further North Korea’s weapons tests while simultaneously blaming the West for the ongoing war. Russia also joins hands with China to block the United States’ attempts at the Security Council to strengthen sanctions on North Korea over its rapidly advancing missile tests.
In 2023, Kim meets Putin in Russia for their first summit since 2019, while international reports follow that military exchanges between North Korea and Russia sharply increased after this.
On October 18, 2023, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov visited North Korea and openly declared Russia’s gratitude to North Korea for their unwavering support for the campaign in Ukraine.
On March 8, 2024, Russia vetoed a UN Security Council resolution that effectively terminated the monitoring of sanctions against North Korea’s nuclear programme.
On June 19, Putin arrives in Russia, and a day later, after many public displays of friendship and warmth between the two leaders, they sign this formidable strategic defence pact.
What’s next, you might ask, in this long alliance of camaraderie and occasional hiccups?
The “friendly relations” between North Korea and Russia “have emerged as a strong strategic fortress for preserving international justice and peace and an engine for accelerating the building of a new multipolar world,” declared the Korean Central News Agency. The world is waiting and watching with bated breath.
The author is a freelance journalist and features writer based out of Delhi. Her main areas of focus are politics, social issues, climate change and lifestyle-related topics. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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