North Korea.How did the meeting between Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un go?

The president of Russia went to North Korea for the first time since 2000.Relations between the two countries are increasingly close and this worries the West.

• Relations between Russia and North Korea have grown closer since 2022, the year in which Moscow invaded Ukraine.
• The North Korean regime supplies Moscow with weapons in exchange for technological and economic support.
• After Kim Jong-un's visit to Russia in 2023, it was now Putin who went to Pyongyang to sign new agreements.

There Russia and the North Korea they signed a new one strategic partnership agreement.The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, is on a two-day visit to Pyongyang for the first time since 2000, in what was also the first visit by a foreign leader to the North Korean regime since the pandemic.

Russia is increasingly isolated internationally after the invasion ofUkraine in 2022, North Korea is one of the few remaining actors with which to enter into trade agreements, particularly in the field of weapons.The North Korean regime is too profoundly isolated and friendship with Russia can be a breath of fresh air for its economy, brought to its knees by international sanctions.

The new friendship between Russia and North Korea

The last time Vladimir Putin had been to North Korea, the dictator of the Asian regime was still Kim Jong-il.Relations between the two states were good, it was the long tail of the cold war when the North Korean regime had positioned itself in the Soviet bloc.But then relations cooled due to the Russian attempt to normalize relations with the West, so much so that Putin himself had given the okay to some of the sanctions imposed by the international community on Pyongyang for its nuclear program.

Since 2022, when Russia militarily invadedUkraine, things have changed.The international community isolated Moscow and made it the subject of heavy sanctions and Putin returned to his old friends.Among these also North Korea, which with its war industry played an important role in the supply of artillery shells, rockets and other ammunition needed for the war in Ukraine.The two countries have denied having signed military agreements, which are also prohibited by the international conventions of which Russia is part, but according to US and South Korean intelligence the flow of weapons from Pyongyang to Moscow has been growing over time, in exchange for food aid and fuel, necessary for the North Korean regime brought to its knees by international isolation.

That a new honeymoon is underway between the two countries is also demonstrated by the visit of the current North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, in Russia last September.It was probably precisely on that occasion that the exchange agreements were finalized weapons-economic aid between the two countries, as demonstrated by the visit of the North Korean dictator to some Russian factories in the military and satellite fields.Now instead, a 24 years old since the last time, it was Russian President Vladimir Putin who went to North Korea.

The fears of the West

The visit was announced at the last minute, on Monday 17 June.And  on June 19, Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived at Pyongyang, decorated for the occasion with Russian flags and animated by welcome parades.Here Putin moved around the city in the same car as Kim Jong-un, one Russian-made limousine donated by Moscow during the last meeting.

“Russia is the most honest friend and ally“, said the North Korean dictator on the sidelines of the first day of bilateral meetings.Vladimir Putin instead underlined that the two countries, together, are fighting “against decades of hegemonic and imperialist policies of the United States and its satellites."The Russian president then underlined that international sanctions against North Korea must be reviewed, a statement that follows last May's veto at UN Security Council on the renewal of the mandate of experts called to investigate possible violations of sanctions.

The first day of Vladimir Putin's visit to North Korea ended with the signing of a strategic cooperation agreement the details of which were not provided, but which in light of the trade exchanges of recent months is likely to intensify sale of weapons North Koreans to Moscow, in exchange for further economic support.Putin himself he admitted that the new agreement “does not exclude a technical-military cooperation” between the two countries and that in case one of the two is attacked the other will undertake to give military assistance.“A defensive pact”, the Russian president defined it, which however alarmed the West and South Korea.The United States and the Born they said to each other concerned about the strengthening of friendship between Russia and North Korea, which could reshuffle the global and Asian balances, while also reinvigorating the nuclear program North Korean.