Kim Jong Un, in recent months, has prioritized relations with Moscow as he attempts to break out of international isolation and strengthen his footing, actively supporting Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine.
North Korea and Russia reached a new agreement for expanding economic cooperation following high-level talks in Pyongyang this week, the North’s state media said Thursday (November 21, 2024), as they continue to align in the face of their confrontations with Washington.
North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency didn’t elaborate on the details of the agreement signed Wednesday between its senior trade officials and a Russian delegation led by Alexandr Kozlov, the country’s minister of natural resources and ecology. On Tuesday, the Russian news agency Tass said that officials, following an earlier round of talks, agreed to increase the number of charter flights between the countries to promote tourism.
North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency didn’t elaborate on the details of the agreement signed Wednesday between its senior trade officials and a Russian delegation led by Alexandr Kozlov, the country’s minister of natural resources and ecology. On Tuesday, the
Russian news agency Tass said that officials, following an earlier round of talks, agreed to increase the number of charter flights between the countries to promote tourism.
KCNA said Mr. Kozlov arrived in North Korea on Sunday and met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and his top economic official, Premier Kim Tok Hun, before returning home on Wednesday. During Kozlov’s visit, Russian President Vladimir Putin gifted Pyongyang’s Central Zoo with more than 70 animals, including lions, bears, and several species of birds, according to Tass, in another display of the countries’ growing ties.
In recent months, Kim Jong Un has prioritized relations with Moscow as he attempts to break out of international isolation and strengthen his footing. He actively supports Mr. Putin’s war on Ukraine while portraying the North as a player in a united front against
Washington.
Mr Kim has yet to directly acknowledge that he has been providing military equipment and troops to Russia to support its fight against Ukraine. South Korea’s National Intelligence Service told lawmakers in a closed-door briefing on Wednesday that an estimated 11,000 North Korean soldiers in late October were moved to Russia’s Kursk region, where Ukrainian troops seized parts of its territory this year, following their training in Russia’s northeast.
The spy agency believes the
North Korean soldiers were assigned to Russia’s marine and airborne forces units. Lee Seong Kweun, a lawmaker who attended the meeting, said some of them have already begun fighting alongside the Russians on the frontlines. U.S., South Korean, and Ukrainian officials have claimed that the North has also been supplying Russia with artillery systems, missiles, and other equipment.
North Korea would be possibly getting anywhere between $320 million and $1.3 billion annually from Russia for sending its troops to Ukraine, considering the scale of the dispatch and the level of payments Russia has been providing to foreign mercenaries, according to a recent study by Lim Soo-ho, a South Korean analyst at an NIS-run think tank.
While that would be meaningful income for North Korea’s crippled and heavily sanctioned economy, it could be lower than the money the North earns from illicit coal exports or supplying military equipment to Russia, Lim said. This suggests that North Korea’s troop dispatch is less about money than acquiring key Russian technologies to advance further its nuclear weapons and missile program, which is a significant concern in Seoul, Mr. Lim said.
Amid the stalemate in more extensive nuclear negotiations with Washington, Kim has been dialling up the pressure on South Korea, abandoning his country’s long-standing goal of inter-Korean reconciliation and verbally threatening to attack the South with nukes if provoked. He has used Russia’s war on Ukraine as a distraction to accelerate the development of his nuclear-armed military, which now has various nuclear-capable systems targeting South Korea and intercontinental ballistic missiles that can potentially reach the U.S. mainland.
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