Update on the just completed visit of Korean leader Kim Jong Un to Russia
To all appearances, Kim Jong Un’s visit to Russia ended today, less than 24 hours after it began. I say this based on the live reporting of Sixty Minutes co-host Yevgeny Popov a couple of hours ago. Popov was standing from just outside the building on the Vostochny space complex in the Amur region of the Russian Far East, where the Korean delegation had been meeting and feasting. With him we watched how Putin saw off the Korean leader to his limousine taking him to the nearby train station for the return trip to Pyongyang.
Short and sweet. Russian news carried video images of the exchange of toasts by the heads of state during a festive banquet that preceded the departure. We were told that all-in-all the two sides met for two hours of talks with all key officials present and for an additional hour of tête-à-tête talks between Kim and Putin.
What could they possibly achieve in this brief get-together, you may ask? However, that would be to miss the point highlighted by Russian commentators on state television, namely that over the past year the number of staff at the Russian embassy in Pyongyang more than doubled and was filled with experts who surely were preparing all the agreements which were officially signed during the visit.
Why was the meeting held in the Vostochny space launch complex, or cosmodrome? Firstly, because such a visit was a mirror image of what Russian Defense Minister Shoigu was shown in Korea during his visit there this spring – the Koreans’ latest achievements in missile technology.
The Russians are immensely proud of the Vostochny site which has been replacing their main launch site at Baikonur from Soviet days. Baikonur is in Kazakhstan. Vostochny is on Russian land. At Vostochny they can show off their state of the art military and civilian space technologies. This addresses the known Korean pursuit of assistance in launching military spy satellites, where so far they have failed on their own. More broadly, it underlines the fact that cooperation in the “military technical” sphere is the driving force of Russian-Korean partnership.
The term “military-technical” entered the vocabulary of Russia observers at the start of the Special Military Operation when it was used by Defense Minister Shoigu to describe what the Russians would be deploying to vanquish the Ukrainians and their Western backers. At the time, nearly all Western pundits were scratching their heads over the term.
Now we know better. “Military-technical” puts the accent on military hardware as opposed to warm bodies in uniform, and Shoigu was confident that the latest Russian equipment now in serial production would prove its worth against anything that the West supplied to Kiev. Watching the videos of German Leopard tanks, British Challenger II tanks and American Bradley armored personnel carriers burning to ash after being struck by Russian artillery and the killer drone known as “Lancet,” we understand today that he was right.
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“Old friends are better than new clothes.” This bit of folk wisdom was part of Vladimir Putin’s toast at the festive banquet. But are the Russian-Korean relations something more than friendship?
There was no qualification of the relations as “strategic partnership” or “alliance” or even “higher than alliance,” such as has been used to describe Russian-Chinese relations by the principals of both countries. Here, with the Koreans, it was just “friends.”
What exactly did these friends agree upon? It is unlikely we will know for some time. Defense Minister Shoigu went before cameras earlier today but he spoke only about further destruction of Ukrainian military equipment and personnel. Not a word about the Koreans.
From the commentary of panelists on Sixty Minutes yesterday and today, we can assume that officially Russia will insist it is honoring its signature on the UN sanctions against North Korea whatever it does in the days ahead. Russian shipments of agricultural commodities and hydrocarbons to North Korea in the coming weeks will be described as “humanitarian aid,” which is not subject to sanctions. However, the message goes out on these talk shows that Russia is considering revoking its signature on the sanctions and going flat out to cooperate with the North Koreans in every domain.
In the meantime, the Russians are watching with pleasure how Jake Sullivan and his bosses in the American national security team are squirming as they try to invent new sanctions to impose on Pongyang.
As another Russian talk show reminds us “Time Will Tell.”
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023