IRIA News

North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un entered Russia aboard his armored private train on September 10, 2023. Kim traveled across Russian cities to meet President Vladimir Putin for a rare in-person encounter for the first time since 2019.

According to the KCNA report, Kim Jong Un departed on a visit to Russia on an invitation from Russian President Vladimir Putin. The bilateral meeting between Putin and Kim took place after the Eastern Economic Forum.

Russia’s Natural Resources and Environment Minister Alexander Kozlov was the first Russian official to meet and welcome the North Korean leader as he made a stop at the Khasan station in Russia’s far-eastern Primorye Region.

At the welcoming ceremony, Kim said he was “pleased to visit Russia again” four years after his visit in 2019, adding that the trip was his “first foreign visit after the worldwide public health crisis.”

According to KCNA, the goal of the North Korean leader’s visit to Russia is to “take the friendly relations to new heights.” Kim thanked the Russian side for a warm welcome and conveyed his best wishes to Russian President Vladimir Putin upon his arrival.

Kim-Putin meeting

The meeting between the two leaders took place on September 13, at the Vostochny Cosmodrome, Russia’s central spaceport in the far-east region. They shook hands before the four-hour-long bilateral meeting. Putin welcomed Kim as he said that he was “very glad to see” him.

The talks between the leaders of the two heavily sanctioned regimes focused on strengthening bilateral relations as Moscow and Pyongyang are continuing their standoff against Western powers.

The summit offered a chance for Putin to strike a deal with the North Korean leader for much-needed weapons to support Moscow’s war against Ukraine. Meanwhile, Kim is seeking economic aid and military technology for his impoverished country.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said there were no plans to sign documents, according to Russian state media. “The full range of relations implies dialogue and interaction in sensitive areas, such as military interaction, the exchange of views on the most pressing issues in the field of security,” Peskov said.

Space cooperation

The venue of the meeting is Russia’s most prominent spaceport, signaling a possible space deal between Russia and North Korea. Pyongyang has already tried and failed to send its much-anticipated spy satellite into space twice in the last few months.

Ahead of the meeting, Putin was asked whether Russia would help North Korea launch its satellite and rocket, to which he replied, “That’s exactly why we came here.”

“The leader of North Korea shows great interest in space, in rocketry, and they are trying to develop space. We’ll show our new objects,” he added.

North Korea’s missile launch

Hours before the meeting, the Defense Ministry of Japan reported North Korea launched two missiles, presumed to be ballistic ones.

The missiles covered a distance of 350 kilometers and 650 kilometers, respectively, and fell outside Japan’s exclusive economic zone.

South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff also detected two short-range ballistic missiles fired 10 minutes apart from each other from the Sunan area near Pyongyang’s international airport.

US threatens more sanctions

The meeting between Kim and Putin is being closely watched by the U.S. and its allies. the United States has threatened to “aggressively” enforce existing sanctions and add new ones if Pyongyang provides weapons to Moscow for its war in Ukraine.

The U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said “I will remind both countries that any transfer of arms from North Korea to Russia would be in violation of multiple United Nations Security Council resolutions.”

“We, of course, have aggressively enforced our sanctions against entities that fund Russia’s war effort, and we will continue to enforce those sanctions and will not hesitate to impose new sanctions if appropriate,” he added.