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Russian President Vladimir Putin has thanked North Korean leader Kim Jong Un for his support for Moscow’s war in Ukraine at a meeting in Pyongyang where they are expected to agree a new strategic partnership to deepen trade and military ties.
“We highly appreciate your consistent and unchanging support of the Russian policies, including in the Ukrainian direction,” Putin told Kim, on his first visit to the isolated communist country in more than two decades.
Kim praised Russia’s “important role and mission in preserving the strategic stability and balance in the world”, vowing to “strengthen strategic interaction with Russia” as the global geopolitical situation is “exacerbating and changing rapidly”.
The meeting follows Kim’s visit to Russia’s Far East in September, when he and Putin toured the Vostochny Cosmodrome, Moscow’s most advanced space rocket launch site.
US and South Korean officials believe economic exchanges and arms transfers between Russia and North Korea have sharply expanded since their meeting last year, and fear that deeper ties would lead to Pyongyang providing more weapons to Russia in return for economic aid and transfers of military technology.
US state secretary Antony Blinken said on Tuesday that Russia was desperately trying to cement relations with countries that could provide it with weapons for the Ukraine war as Pyongyang provided Moscow with “significant munitions” and other weapons.
Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg, who was with Blinken in Washington, told reporters that he was concerned by possible Russian support for North Korea’s nuclear and missile programmes.
Russia had offered technological help for North Korea’s spy satellites in return for North Korea’s agreement to supply nearly 5mn artillery shells, Seoul’s defence minister Shin Won-sik told Bloomberg.
China, which in recent years has been North Korea’s main economic backer, is also thought to be wary about the deepening relationship between Putin and Kim. Their meeting came a day after China and South Korea held their first high-level security meeting in Seoul for the first time in nine years and agreed to strengthen relations in a “more mature, healthier direction”.
South Korean officials asked their Chinese counterparts to play a more constructive role to reduce tensions on the Korean peninsula.
Rising tensions on the peninsula sparked by increasing military co-operation between Moscow and Pyongyang were against China’s interests, South Korean officials said.
Experts said Russia’s offer of food and military technology would make it more difficult to entice Pyongyang into denuclearisation talks while more North Korean arms transfers to Russia would strengthen Ukraine’s need for weapons from its allies.
In March, Russia blocked the renewal of a UN panel that monitors compliance with Security Council sanctions against North Korea, resulting in that body’s dissolution.
“Getting back to negotiations with North Korea faces a real uphill battle,” said Jenny Town, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center think-tank. “There are broader issues here to adjust including how to end current conflicts to which North Korea is providing lethal military aid.”
Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, said more was at stake than the deepening ties between Russia and North Korea.
“The integrity of the international order is in question over the defence of Ukraine and the implementation of UN Security Council Resolutions,” he said. “Moscow’s transfer of sensitive military technologies to Pyongyang would not only violate UN sanctions but could also destabilise the Korean peninsula and east Asia.”
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