With North Korea trip, sanctioned Putin copies ‘Kim family playbook’

SEOUL, South Korea — Russian President Vladimir Putin’s two-day visit for talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, confirmed in both capitals Monday, will likely accelerate arms and technology exchanges as ties between the two U.S. adversaries deepen.

The bigger takeaway from Mr. Putin’s first visit to Pyongyang in nearly a quarter century may be hard-earned lessons about anti-Western resilience.

“At the invitation of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, Russian President Vladimir Putin will pay a friendly state visit to [North Korea] on June 18-19,” Russia’s official news agency TASS confirmed. Mr. Putin, who has rarely traveled abroad since launching his invasion of Ukraine nearly 2½ years ago, will also visit Vietnam this week before returning to the Kremlin.

Though Russian officials did not detail Mr. Putin’s agenda in Pyongyang, the capital of one of the world’s most opaque states, the visit had been widely signaled.

Mr. Kim, who also rarely ventures abroad, traveled to a satellite launch base in the Russian Far East for talks with Mr. Putin in September. A reciprocal visit was widely expected. Cooperation between the two heavily sanctioned, anti-Western states has accelerated, and Mr. Putin is expected to receive a warm welcome and a possible parade in his honor in the North Korean capital.

With Russia and North Korea facing an imposing array of international economic sanctions, Pyongyang has stepped up to support Mr. Putin’s military campaign in Ukraine.

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South Korea says as many as 3 million shells and tactical rockets have been transferred from North Korea to Russia, fueling Moscow’s grinding advance in recent months in Ukraine. In return, Russia is thought to have been assisting North Korea with satellite launch technologies as Pyongyang struggles to get military spy satellites into orbit.

With North Korea perennially short of oil and food, Russia is widely expected to barter those commodities for more arms and munitions and perhaps for North Korean labor to help rebuild captured Ukrainian cities and infrastructure.

Russia may also be seeking naval access to North Korea’s northeastern port of Rason. That access would disperse its Pacific Fleet from its main base at Vladivostok.

Changing attitudes

Mr. Putin last visited North Korea in July 2000, months after his presidential inauguration. He held talks with Mr. Kim’s father, Kim Jong-il, who died in 2011.

Analysts who once thought that millennial Russia would not get too close to the highly toxic North Korea are changing their minds as the war in Ukraine drags on, Russian-Western animosity grows and Moscow reaches out to a fellow pariah.

“I cannot rule out that the Russian government might one day like to go back to the embrace of the civilized world,” said Andrei Lankov, an academic who studies North Korea at Seoul’s Kookmin University. “But even if that is the case, I don’t think it really influences their attitude toward North Korea.”

Mr. Putin may even be looking to North Korea, often described as a pariah state, for pointers on how to survive politically in the face of a hostile U.S. and international pressure.

“Putin is using the Kim family playbook. The only difference is Kim’s regime is based on dynastic rule and hereditary power succession, while Putin is ruling as a collective leadership of former KGB operatives,” said Leonid Petrov, a Russian-born North Korea watcher and a fellow at Australian National University.

Tightening internal controls in Russia are starting to resemble Mr. Kim’s repressive regime, analysts say, including the engineered reelection campaign that secured Mr. Putin another six-year lease on power in the Kremlin.

“There is no political opposition in Russia anymore, like North Korea, and the border is being more controlled in, I think, preparation for a complete shutdown if Putin prepares another mobilization,” Mr. Petrov said. “Political, economic and personal freedoms are being curtailed in Russia, not to the extent they are in North Korea, but significantly more than just a few years ago.”

Soviet citizens once looked down on impoverished, isolated North Korea, but attitudes are in flux as their heirs face circumstances similar to those that North Koreans have endured for decades.

“When I lived in the USSR, North Korea was mocked as being the poorest country of the communist bloc, completely unfree and super reclusive,” Mr. Petrov said. “These days, the attitude is more positive. It stood up against U.S. ‘imperialism,’ which Putin’s Russia has decided to repeat.”

Modern North Korea is also symbolic of the hard-core, militaristic days of the Soviet Union that many in Russia hope to recapture.

“Russians are nostalgic about the USSR, and North Korea is [reminiscent] of what older Russians experienced in their formative years, so the general attitude toward North Korea is more and more positive,” Mr. Petrov said. “North Korea did not care about international sanctions, and that is what Russia is trying to do now. They see the Kim Jong-un dictatorship as strong leadership.”

In Vietnam, Mr. Putin plans to meet with Gen. Nguyen Phu Trong, secretary general of the Vietnamese Communist Party, President To Lam, Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh and National Assembly Chairman Tran Thanh Man. The two sides will discuss “a comprehensive strategic partnership between Russia and Vietnam in the trade and economy, scientific and technology, and humanitarian fields,” the Kremlin said.

The U.S., which has cultivated Vietnam as a security and trade partner in recent years, has criticized the upcoming meeting.

“As Russia continues to seek international support to sustain its illegal and brutal war against Ukraine, we reiterate that no country should give Putin a platform to promote his war of aggression and otherwise allow him to normalize his atrocities,” a U.S. Embassy spokesperson in Hanoi told The Associated Press.

The warmer ties between the Kim and Putin regimes undercut Western policies of isolation and sanctions.

“North Korea never traded with the West, and Russia used to, but both sides surprisingly quickly found ways to go their separate paths,” said Mr. Lankov. “Our leverage now is ‘blah blah blah’ leverage.”