Putin turns to old friend North Korea for help
After the handshakes, the platitudes and the lunch of Kamchatka crab dumplings, the outcome of the talks between Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un stayed hidden.
But the summit’s location — Russia’s Far East spaceport — offered a big clue.
By choosing the Vostochny Cosmodrome, Putin has signaled his readiness to share Russian rocket and space technology with Pyongyang in exchange for access to North Korea’s mammoth arms stockpiles for the war in Ukraine.
The move underscored Russia’s estrangement on the world stage and the shrinking circle of friends that Moscow can rely on, thanks to the 18-month-old invasion. At the same time, it heralds new threats for stability in northeast Asia and beyond.
The nearly five hours of talks Wednesday between Putin and Kim marked a new high point in the ties between the old allies — a relationship that dates back nearly eight decades to Soviet leader Josef Stalin and Kim’s grandfather, North Korean founder Kim Il Sung.
North Korea has relied on Soviet-designed weapons since the 1950-53 Korean War and has some of the world’s largest ammunition stockpiles, estimated at tens of millions of artillery shells and rockets.
Russia is eager to tap that trove after having spent a significant share of its arsenal in fighting Europe’s largest ground conflict since World War II, with thousands of shells fired daily by each side.
Western officials saw the summit with North Korea as an effort by Putin to secure a potential arms bonanza for his military.
“It looks like they’re very focused on the artillery shells (and) the multiple-rocket launchers for battlefield use,” said John Park, director of the Korea Project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. “These are things that can be immediately applied in terms of this war of attrition that is playing out in Ukraine.”
U.S. officials have cast it as a sign of desperation by Putin. Russia was “scraping the bottom of the barrel looking for help because it’s having trouble sustaining its military,” said James O’Brien, head of the Office of Sanctions Coordination at the U.S. State Department.
Putin, however, didn’t seem to care about the optics of meeting with Kim, with the West now considering both leaders to be pariahs.
“For Russia, it’s simply that the ends justify the means,” said James Nixey, director of the Russia and Eurasia program at Chatham House, a Londonbased think-tank. “It’s perfectly comfortable with alliances of any shape form on nature as long as they serve perceived Russian national interests.”
The need for munitions in the Ukraine war is hardly one-sided. In addition to Western supplies of new tanks, missiles and other weapons systems, the U.S. and its allies have drained the stockpiles of Sovietera arms and munitions in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond to help President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
With both Russia and Ukraine digging in for what could be a long war, the North Korean munitions could offer Moscow a critical lifeline as it tries to boost its domestic arms output. North Korea also could increase its ammunition production at Russia’s behest.
“It’s the immediate benefit of existing stockpiles and also the potential to crank up on the production side if they want to go that direction as well,” Park said.
Yang Uk, a security expert at South Korea’s Asan Institute for Policy Studies, noted that in addition to Soviet-designed armaments, North Korea also could share some of its latest military equipment.
Amid tensions with the South, Pyongyang has heavily relied on artillery and developed long-range systems that could add capabilities that Moscow lacks.
“Beyond merely transferring ammunition, there is also a strong possibility that North Korea would be willing to provide Russia with some of the advanced weapons systems it developed and publicly boasted about to be used for the war in Ukraine,” Yang said.