SEOUL: Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday (Jun 18) praised North Korea for “firmly supporting” Moscow’s war in Ukraine ahead of his visit to Pyongyang aimed at boosting ties between the nuclear-armed allies.
“We highly appreciate that the DPRK is firmly supporting the special military operations of Russia being conducted in Ukraine,” Putin wrote in an article carried by the official Korean Central News Agency, using the acronym for North Korea’s official name.
The two countries are “now actively developing the many-sided partnership”, Putin wrote, pointing to, for example, the fact that Moscow and Kim Jong Un’s regime have been “maintaining the common line and stand at the UN”.
Putin is set to arrive in the isolated North, which is under successive rounds of United Nations sanctions over Kim’s banned weapons programmes, late on Tuesday for his first visit since 2000.
The trip “will put bilateral cooperation onto a higher level with our joint efforts and this will contribute to developing reciprocal and equal cooperation between Russia and the DPRK”, the Russian leader wrote, according to KCNA.
Historic allies dating back to North Korea’s founding after World War II, Moscow and Pyongyang have drawn ever closer since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, as Putin has become increasingly isolated and is looking for friends, experts say.
Last year, Kim made a rare overseas trip on his bulletproof train to meet Putin at a Russian spaceport.
Seoul, Washington and Kyiv have subsequently claimed that North Korea is shipping weapons to Russia for use in its war in Ukraine, violating rafts of UN sanctions, in return for technical help with its nascent satellite programme.
North Korea has denied this, calling the claim “absurd” – even as it thanked Russia for using its UN veto in March to effectively end monitoring of sanctions violations, just as the UN experts were starting to probe alleged arms transfers.
Kim has also ramped up weapons testing, including a flurry of launches this year of cruise missiles, which analysts said North Korea could be supplying to Russia for use in Ukraine.
A Pentagon report last month said that Russia was using North Korean ballistic missiles in Ukraine, citing debris analysis.
