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North Korea will “unconditionally support” Russia’s goals in Ukraine, the country’s leader Kim Jong Un told visiting Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov this week, according to North Korea’s state news agency, as the two countries reaffirmed their deepening military and economic ties.
Lavrov met with Kim on Saturday on the leader’s yacht near the coastal resort of Wonsan after arriving in North Korea to a red-carpet welcome on Friday.
Lavrov thanked his host for the weapons and troops already sent by Pyongyang to aid Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, describing it as a “sincere expression of solidarity”, and said that the format any future military support would take was up to Kim.
North Korean ammunition and troops played a decisive role in Russia’s fight this spring to restore control over the Kursk region, swaths of which were seized and occupied by Ukrainian forces last year.
Russia is intensifying its summer offensive in Ukraine, but it remains unclear whether North Korean troops will be involved in fighting beyond Russia’s internationally recognised borders.
According to a new report by South Korean military intelligence, cited by news agency Yonhap on Sunday, Pyongyang has dispatched some 13,000 troops and 12mn rounds of shells to Russia since October, and is likely to send further troops this summer.
The Kremlin has been escalating its drone and missile attacks on Ukraine, with Kyiv and the surrounding region predominantly targeted in recent assaults. The attacks come as Russia gains ground in the east of the country, where its troops are advancing at their fastest pace since November.
In June, Russian security council chair Sergei Shoigu announced that North Korea had pledged a further deployment of 6,000 military personnel, including 5,000 military construction workers, to aid Russian reconstruction efforts in its Kursk region.
Asked whether, with Kursk retaken, North Korean troops could now support Russia’s military efforts in other areas of the front line — which would entail fighting on Ukraine’s sovereign territory — Lavrov said Pyongyang “itself determines the forms in which we implement our strategic partnership agreement”.
That agreement, signed in June last year during Russian President Vladimir Putin’s first visit to the isolated communist country in more than two decades, has formed the basis for North Korea’s military support.
North Korea’s official news agency summarised Lavrov’s three-day visit on Sunday, saying the two countries discussed “defending the common core interests by further developing the comprehensive strategic partnership”.
Kim reaffirmed that North Korea ‘‘is ready to unconditionally support and encourage all the measures taken by the Russian leadership as regards the tackling of the root cause of the Ukrainian crisis in keeping with the spirit of the interstate treaty,” the KCNA news agency said.
Alongside military co-operation, Moscow and Pyongyang have increasingly fostered economic and social ties. Some North Korean products are now appearing in Russian supermarkets, while Moscow is promoting joint infrastructure projects including the construction of a large bridge connecting the two countries.
In a resort near the coastal city of Wonsan on Saturday, Lavrov said flight connections had been restored between Russia and North Korea, after a hiatus of several years, and said he hoped Russian tourists would increasingly choose to visit North Korea.
Russia “respects and understands” North Korea’s rationale for pursuing a nuclear weapons programme, Lavrov said, citing last month’s US bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities as evidence supporting Pyongyang’s strategic calculations.
“It is precisely because these conclusions were drawn in a timely manner that no one is even contemplating the use of force against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” Lavrov said. “We respect the DPRK’s actions and understand the reasoning behind its nuclear ambitions.”
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