North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is expected to hold a summit with President Vladimir Putin as soon as Wednesday that could focus on weapons after the two leaders visited areas of Russia’s east.
(Bloomberg) — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is expected to hold a summit with President Vladimir Putin as soon as Wednesday that could focus on weapons after the two leaders visited areas of Russia’s east.
No time or venue for a meeting has been announced by either side but reports from Ria Novosti and other Russian media outlets suggested Putin may soon visit the Vostochny Cosmodrome space center in the Amur region, fueling speculation this could be the summit site.
“I have my own program there, you’ll find out when I get there,” Putin was quoted as saying by Ria.
The US has said that Kim and Putin are likely to discuss North Korea providing artillery and rockets to Russia for its war in Ukraine. Kim may be looking for food aid and technology to support his plans to deploy a nuclear-powered submarine and spy satellites.
The summit between the two leaders who have faced international isolation and sanctions marks the first time Kim has left the Korean Peninsula since 2019, when he held his only other summit with Putin in Vladivostok.
Photos released by North Korean state media show Kim is traveling with his foreign minister, top military officials and senior cadres in his weapons sector, indicating that munitions could be on the summit agenda.
Kim’s luxury armored train rolled into Russia on Tuesday. North Korea’s state media showed him in a suit stepping off the train in Khasan, where he was greeted by Russian officials at the city just across the border from North Korea.
Read: Kim’s Transport of Choice Is a Slow, Swanky Bulletproof Train
Kim was on a trip to put “relations of friendship and cooperation on a fresh higher level,” the official Korean Central News Agency reported Wednesday, without saying where Kim was headed after Khasan.
Putin spoke at a keynote session of his annual economic forum in the Russian port city of Vladivostok on Tuesday. He used that venue to call the legal cases former US President Donald Trump is facing “political persecution” that inadvertently benefits Russia by revealing the true face of its foes.
For months the US has accused North Korea of supplying munitions to help Putin’s war in Ukraine, something Moscow and Pyongyang have denied. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told a news briefing this week that “pariah” Putin is “traveling across his own country, hat in hand, to beg Kim Jong Un for military assistance.”
The most obvious items Pyongyang has and Moscow needs are artillery shells and rockets that Moscow can use in the Soviet-era weaponry it has pushed into action in Ukraine.
North Korea has some of the world’s largest supplies of munitions that are interoperable with Soviet-era systems, which Russia needs as it burns through its stocks of artillery shells. The US has said any supplies would not alter the course of the war and has told Pyongyang it would pay a price for any arms transfers.
–With assistance from Eduard Gismatullin.
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