In a show of defiance against Western sanctions, Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un signed a comprehensive strategic pact on Wednesday pledging to come to each other’s assistance in case of a military attack — the starkest evidence yet of Russia’s alignment with anti-Western nations determined to topple the United States as a global leader.
Putin, visiting the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, for the first time since 2000, said Russia and North Korea “pursue an independent foreign policy and do not accept the language of blackmail and diktat.”
“The comprehensive partnership agreement signed today provides, among other things, for mutual assistance in the event of aggression against one of the parties to this agreement,” Putin said.
Shunned by the West over his invasion of Ukraine, Putin is seeking partners who share his anti-Western stance, including China, Iran and North Korea. Kim extolled the “firm alliance” with Moscow and openly backed Putin’s war against Ukraine, the strongest support for Russia’s invasion from any foreign leader.
“Moscow and Pyongyang will continue to oppose the practice of sanctions strangulation that the West has become accustomed to,” Putin said, calling for a review of U.N. sanctions against North Korea over its nuclear weapons program.
His remarks — supporting North Korea’s right to “take justified measures” to ensure its national security — will inevitably increase Western fears of new Russian military and technological support for North Korea.
Putin also blamed the “confrontational policy” of the United States for undermining peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula.
“We categorically reject the attempts to blame [North Korea] for the worsening situation,” Putin said, adding that Pyongyang was “entitled to take justified measures to strengthen its national defense capacities, ensure national security, and protect its sovereignty.”
Russia for years backed U.N. sanctions against North Korea but in March vetoed a Security Council vote on extending a U.N. panel of experts monitoring sanctions compliance. Since then, senior Russian officials have repeatedly used the term “strangulation” to describe the U.N. sanctions.
Putin first visited North Korea in 2000, shortly after his election as president, becoming the only Russian or Soviet leader to travel to Pyongyang. He wanted to restore his country’s influence over the Korean Peninsula. For the next 24 years, he saw no need to return — until Wednesday.
The reason: To sustain his war on Ukraine, he needs North Korea’s help.
After an ostentatious welcome ceremony and an afternoon of meetings, the two emerged to announce their shared vision of a united front against the West and the U.S.-led global order. Putin asserted his country’s fight against “decades of imperialist policies” of the United States and its allies. In turn, North Korea promised “full support and solidarity for the Russian government, army and people” in the war in Ukraine, state media agencies reported.
The two leaders signed an agreement on “comprehensive strategic partnership,” Russian media reported. The text was not immediately published, but Russian officials said before the meeting that it would replace previous key documents.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un signed an aid agreement in Pyongyang on June 19. (Video: The Washington Post)
Whatever the ultimate extent of the agreement, it served as a clear rejoinder to President Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky just six days after they signed a 10-year security agreement committing the United States to provide Kyiv with a wide range of military aid.
Putin’s visit underscored the dramatic changes in the countries’ relationship in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. For decades after the founding of North Korea in 1945, the Soviet Union served as its main economic and security benefactor. Now, as Putin faces growing isolation and a dwindling supply of artillery to use in Ukraine, North Korea has become one of its few remaining sources of diplomatic and military support.
In a front-page article in the newspaper of North Korea’s ruling party, Putin proposed cooperation between Moscow and Pyongyang in fighting sanctions, in creating a new security architecture across Eurasia, and in science and tourism. He wrote that Russia would a form a new trade and financial network to compete with Western-controlled global financial institutions.
“Russia is fighting the hegemonic and imperialist policy of the United States and its satellites against the Russian Federation which has been imposed for decades,” Putin wrote. “We highly appreciate your consistent and unwavering support for Russian policy, including in the Ukrainian direction.”
North Korea, for its part, has plenty to gain from Russia. Kim is facing increasing economic sanctions and isolation because of his nuclear ambitions. He needs food, fuel, cash and weapons technology — all of which Russia can provide.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un attend a welcome ceremony at Kim Il Sung Square in Pyongyang on Wednesday. (Vladimir Smirnov/Sputnik/Pool/Reuters)
Still, it is unusual for North Korea to have such a valuable bargaining chip with Russia, given its tiny size, poor economy and international pariah status. Kim is no stranger to bluster, but usually with no real upper hand in a diplomatic negotiation.
“I think the fact that Putin has to come all the way to North Korea to pay his respects underscores how desperate he is for the ammunition he needs from North Korea,” said Michael McFaul, former U.S. ambassador to Russia. “That is a giant reversal from 10 to 20 years ago when Putin was the powerful one. Now he needs weapons, and he needs Kim Jong Un, and he needs weapons for his war in Ukraine.”
It’s unclear whether this is merely a temporary relationship of convenience or a lasting military alliance similar to the Cold War era, analysts say. Either way, it highlights a remarkable evolution in their growing cooperation since the invasion, experts note.
“This summit serves as both a testament to the current strength of the relationship between the two countries and a harbinger of an even stronger partnership in the future,” said Lami Kim, professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu.
Pyongyang was lined with Russian flags and banners with Putin’s photo, welcoming the first major world leader to visit the country since North Korea’s pandemic closures, Russian media footage showed.
Kim did not elaborate on what his “full” support for Russia might look like, but the remarks, reported by Russian media in Pyongyang, will fuel concerns that the outcast leaders of two heavily sanctioned states will use this visit to deepen their military partnership.
Washington and its allies contend that North Korea, which is believed to have a large stockpile of dated artillery shells and rockets compatible with Soviet and Russian weapons systems, has been sending Russia munitions to use against Ukraine.
North Korea has sent at least 10,000 shipping containers to Russia, which could hold as many as 4.8 million of the types of artillery shells that Putin has used in Ukraine, South Korea’s defense minister, Shin Won-sik, told Bloomberg last week.
The State Department said Tuesday that North Korea had unlawfully transferred “dozens of ballistic missiles and over 11,000 containers of munitions to aid Russia’s war effort” in recent months.
Fyodor Tertitskiy, an expert on North Korea’s history and military at Seoul’s Kookmin University, said the visit was purely pragmatic. “They are not both cooperating because they like each other, but because they hope to get something,” he said. “It’s not like an ideological alliance, it’s tactical cooperation.”
On the economic side, Russia may need North Korean labor, said Andrei Lankov, a Russia-born North Korea expert. North Korean workers remain in Russia, in violation of U.N. bans on North Korean labor exports.
“The Russian economy is now going through a minor economic boom … and the shortage of labor is significant. So I expect a large number of North Korean workers to arrive in Russia soon,” Lankov said.
The Kim regime takes the lion’s share of the money the laborers earn abroad.
Although it is unclear what North Korea has received in return so far, there are indications that Russian technology was used in North Korea’s recent efforts to launch a spy satellite into space, experts say.
During Kim’s visit to Moscow in September, Putin promised to support Kim’s ambitions for space technology.
Just two months after that summit, North Korea successfully launched its first military satellite into orbit.
Relations between the two capitals go back decades. Kim’s grandfather, Kim Il Sung, was chosen in 1948 by the Soviet Union as North Korea’s founding president, and Kim’s father, Kim Jong Il, was born in Siberia and grew up with the Russian nickname “Yura.”
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia became more interested in capitalism and less interested in North Korea, supplying it with oil but otherwise doing little to prop it up. Moscow even joined the “six-party talks” process that began in 2005, aimed at convincing Pyongyang that it should drop its nuclear ambitions, although most of North Korea’s nuclear scientists trained in Russia.
All that changed after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Russia — along with China — has enabled North Korea to develop its ballistic missile program in recent years, repeatedly rejecting new sanctions the United States and its allies proposed in response to Pyongyang’s violations of U.N. bans on ballistic missile tests.
Russia used its Security Council veto in March to neuter a long-running sanctions regime designed to deter and slow Pyongyang’s development of its nuclear arsenal. Russian officials accused the West of trying to “strangle” North Korea.
Kim has refused Washington’s efforts to engage with him after denuclearization talks fell apart in 2019. Instead, he has drawn closer to Russia and to China, North Korea’s economic lifeline.
In recent years, Kim has ramped up rhetoric about a “new Cold War” and, along with Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, has called for a “multipolar world” — a vision that seeks an end to the dominance of the United States.
The United States and its allies have repeatedly called on Moscow to follow the “rules-based international order” by respecting international law, territorial integrity and democratic norms.
But Putin, with the support of Xi and now Kim, argues that in a “multipolar” world, countries can operate by a different set of rules.
On Wednesday, North Korean state media described the relationship between Pyongyang and Moscow as “an engine for accelerating the building of a new multipolar world.”
Putin has also made moves to undermine sanctions, edge out the dollar as the major global reserve currency and shape international institutions to suit Russian interests, a campaign that has had resonance among some Global South nations intent on pursuing their own national interests, many of them unhappy with Western pressure to take sides.
Since beginning his fifth term in office this year, Putin’s anti-Western posturing has grown more marked as he seeks to deter Western nations from continuing military support for Ukraine and to constrain Kyiv’s capacity to strike at military targets within Russia.
The Biden administration recently gave Ukraine permission to carry out limited strikes in Russia using U.S. equipment and ammunition, but only in a border region near Kharkiv, in eastern Ukraine, effectively preserving Russia’s advantage.
Putin’s visit to North Korea underscores his recent threat to supply Russian missiles to nations opposed to the West should the United States and other Western nations permit Kyiv to carry out longer-range strikes using Western weapons on military targets in Russia.
