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SEOUL, South Korea — Call them “foul weather friends.”
The leaders of two heavily sanctioned states postured against the U.S. and its allies, Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, had much to discuss after Mr. Putin landed in Pyongyang early Wednesday for a much-anticipated two-day summit.
News reports from Pyongyang said Mr. Kim was at the capital’s airport to greet his guest personally. The city’s streets were decorated with portraits of Mr. Putin and Russian flags, The Associated Press reported.
In an op-ed that ran in North Korean media just hours before his scheduled arrival, Mr. Putin wrote that the two heavily sanctioned nations have a common interest in “resolutely oppos[ing]” Western ambitions to “hinder the establishment of a multipolarized world order based on mutual respect for justice.”
He thanked Mr. Kim’s regime for supporting Russia’s actions in Ukraine and wrote that he and Mr. Kim would upgrade trade and payment systems while jointly opposing sanctions.
The Kremlin said Mr. Putin would spend just one night in Pyongyang before proceeding to Vietnam, but considerable diplomatic foundations already had been laid.
Aides said Mr. Putin was accompanied by several top officials, including Deputy Prime Minister Denis Mantrurov, Defense Minister Andrei Belousov and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Russian officials said the leaders would sign several documents, possibly including an agreement on a comprehensive strategic partnership.
Mr. Putin and Mr. Kim met in the fall at a satellite launch center in the Russian Far East.
Rekindling an old relationship
On his first trip to North Korea in 24 years, Mr. Putin is reforging a relationship that eroded after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 as he seeks badly needed allies for his military campaign in Ukraine.
“For post-Gorbachev, pre-2014 Russia, North Korea was always toxic, but after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, Russia doesn’t care what the West thinks,” said Leonid Petrov, a Russian-born academic and North Korea watcher who is a fellow at Australian National University.
A display of bilateral bonhomie was anticipated in one area where Pyongyang boasts world-class competence: midnight parades of massed military manpower and weaponry.
The visit makes North Korea look like “a bigger player in global politics than it should be,” Jenny Town, a co-founder of the Stimson Center’s North Korean analytical website 38 North, told Seoul-based reporters.
More is at stake than chummy optics. The emerging North Korea-Russia axis offers both players multiple opportunities and allows Mr. Kim to loosen an uneasy long-term dependency on China.
After the Soviet Union’s dissolution, North Korea’s economy collapsed, leaving it massively reliant on Beijing for goods, including fuel, food and medicine, and generating under-the-radar frictions.
Now, with Western enmity forcing Moscow to resurrect old partnerships, Pyongyang gains a friend that is a diplomatic, economic and military powerhouse.
North Korea gets “immediate and tangible results in terms of economic and agricultural cooperation and trade as well as military cooperation, which it has not had since the 1990s,” Ms. Town said.
Closed-door discussions are unlikely to be aired.
“I don’t expect major pronouncements to come out,” Ms. Town said. “The activities they are doing are technically sanctioned, to begin with, and there is a reluctance to put that down on paper.”
Upgraded relations carry rich potential. North Korea is geographically unsuited to agriculture, partly explaining its perennial food shortages, and lacks domestic energy sources. Russia is blessed with grain and oil.
The Kremlin, heavily engaged in Ukraine, needs munitions to feed its hungry guns. North Korea boasts massive stockpiles and a huge military-industrial complex. Chun In-bum, a retired South Korean general, estimated it at 26% of gross domestic product.
The North’s artillery uses the same Warsaw Pact calibers — notably 152 mm howitzer shells and 122 mm tactical rockets — as Russia’s. North Korea is showing signs of accelerating manufacturing.
“Anecdotal evidence suggests that early ammunition sent to Russia had a lot of quality problems, and ammunition there now has higher performance, so it is presumably newly manufactured — not from stockpiles,” said Ms. Town, noting state media images recently showing Mr. Kim touring arms factories and urging greater production.
Russian TV pundits have discussed inviting North Korea’s disciplined and low-cost labor force to rebuild infrastructure conquered by Russian arms in Ukraine.
Another area where Russia could benefit is naval access to a warm-water North Korean port on the East Sea/Sea of Japan. That would offer dispersal opportunities for Moscow’s Pacific Fleet, currently based in Vladivostok, a cold-water port.
It could deploy Russian troops on the same divided peninsula as 28,000 American soldiers.
“Being locked in frozen borders is inconvenient,” said Mr. Petrov, adding that a Russian presence in North Korea would be “strategically close to South Korea, where U.S. troops are stationed.”
China lacks ports on the East Sea/Sea of Japan, so expanded Russian reach “would be much in line with the growing tensions in the region,” Mr. Petrov said.
Andrei Lankov, a North Korea expert at Seoul’s Kookmin University, noted that the port of Rason in the northeast has dual-gauge rail tracks, enabling trains to roll directly to and from North Korea’s border and Russia’s vast rail network.
Mr. Putin and Mr. Kim have tensions to navigate.
One is Pyongyang’s fiercely independent national mindset. Although U.S. troops have remained in the South since an armistice ended Korean War hostilities in 1953, Chinese troops departed the North in 1958.
North Korea was “very persistent in getting rid of foreign troop presence in their country,” said Mr. Lankov. “They worked really hard to get the Chinese out.”
Russia is thought to have extended assistance to North Korea’s most recent reconnaissance satellite launch in May. Mr. Kim was not pleased with the launch’s failure.
“At a recent plenum, Kim Jong-un said it was ‘anti-revolutionary’ to be dependent on foreign military technology and technical assistance,” Ms. Town said.
More than transactional
Some say the rejuvenated Moscow-Pyongyang axis is purely transactional, but others think the warming could be sustainable.
Both countries are confronting a worldwide bloc of prosperous democracies. Russia, which holds a permanent seat on the Security Council, has moved to shelter North Korea from international sanctions, which is a matter of deep frustration for Washington.
“Their cooperation is not just about Ukraine. Russia talks about its ‘War Against the West’ and wants to build an alternative to the U.S.-led world order,” said Ms. Town. “There is reason to believe that Russia sees value in North Korea as a military partner … which does incentivize them to do more with North Korea beyond arms deals supplementing their warfighting in Ukraine.”
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.
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