Kim heads to Russia to revive friendship
PYONGYANG: On the neighbouring mound to Mansu Hill, where giant statues of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il look out over North Korea’s capital, stands the Liberation Tower.
The star-topped stone obelisk has a bronze Soviet Union flag at its base and a panel showing Soviet and Korean troops going into battle together against the Japanese.
The ties between Pyongyang and Moscow, once its most important ally, go back decades. And after years of abeyance, current leader Kim Jong-un – the son and grandson of the chiefs immortalised on Mansu Hill – wants to revive links with nuclear negotiations with Washington deadlocked and as he seeks a counterbalance to China.
Jong-un is expected to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Vladivostok this week, reportedly tomorrow and on Thursday.
The summit – the first between the two neighbours’ leaders since Jong-il met Dmitry Medvedev eight years ago – comes less than two months after the Hanoi meeting between Jong-un and US President Donald Trump broke up without reaching an agreement on the North’s nuclear arsenal.
Jong-un has met Chinese President Xi Jinping four times in the space of a year but is now looking for wider international support in the stand-off, say analysts.
Moscow has already called for international sanctions on the North to be eased, while the United States has accused it of trying to help Pyongyang evade some of the measures, which Russia denies.
After the Hanoi summit, Russia’s ambassador to the North Alexander Matsegora said Pyongyang had been disappointed by the outcome.
Washington should offer concrete concessions rather than “only promises, which are nothing”, he added. “It is not acceptable.”
The inscription on the monument in Pyongyang proclaims that “the great Soviet Union military” had “liberated Koreans from Japanese oppression” and their “heroic” deeds “will shine for 10,000 generations and more”.
In fact, the Soviet Union only declared war on Japan on Aug 8, 1945 – after the US nuclear bombing of Hiroshima.
The destruction of the city and the follow-up strike that reduced Nagasaki to a post-atomic hellscape forced Japan’s surrender, ending World War II and Tokyo’s colonial rule over the peninsula.
But Pyongyang’s official history barely credits the United States for its role in that conflict and blames it for the Korean peninsula’s division, glossing over an agreement to do so between Moscow and Washington.
The Soviets later installed Il-sung as the North’s leader. An exile who fought as a guerrilla against Japanese forces in occupied China, he had fled to the Soviet Union, where records show Jong-il was born.
Moscow was a crucial backer of Pyongyang’s and main aid provider during the Cold War, while Russian became a compulsory foreign language in the North’s schools.
That legacy will help the two leaders cement their relationship, said Ahn Chan-il, a North Korean defector and researcher in Seoul.
“Jong-un’s role model has always been his grandfather, not his father,” he explained.