Putin’s visit to Pyongyang

Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Pyongyang and met Kim Jong Un, The Supreme Leader of North Korea (DPRK). Putin…

Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Pyongyang and met Kim Jong Un, The Supreme Leader of North Korea (DPRK). Putin visited Pyongyang after 24 years in the midst of the War in Ukraine. The two leaders signed a “comprehensive strategic partnership pact” which had a clause similar to Article 5 of NATO. It had provisions for mutual assistance, military and otherwise, in the event of armed aggression against either of the signatories.

Moscow’s gains:

It is certain that one of the agendas of the meeting is weapons supplies for the Russia-Ukraine War. North Korea has a massive stock of artillery shells and short to medium range missiles, most of which are of Soviet origin. Pyongyang would probably be willing to provide these stocks to Moscow in exchange for economic assistance and technical support for the development of more sophisticated weapons systems.

Pyongyang’s gains:

For Pyongyang, this visit is also an important signal to the rest of the world that it is not as isolated as it seems. It is one more cog in an anti-Western alliance, which also includes other isolated states like Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela, and has the tacit support of Beijing. The aforementioned technical and economic support is very important for Pyongyang. Improved weapons, especially longer-range missiles, are a major bargaining chip it can use in extracting concessions from Seoul and Washington.

The Fallout:

With this visit to Pyongyang, Putin has closed the last doors open for a rapproachement with the West, having irked both Seoul and Tokyo in particular. It is also a sign of deepening ties between Moscow and Pyongyang, as the former gets more and more isolated from the West. The economic ties between Moscow on one hand and Tokyo and Seoul on the other, over the past 30 years, have been tossed away.

This visit, and the agreement, provoked sharp reactions from the South Korean Government. Seoul summoned the Russian Ambassador to protest this pact. The reasoning was that with this agreement, Moscow has now become a far bigger threat to the state security of South Korea. It was one of the few states allied with the West that had not joined the 2014 sanctions regime after the illegal annexation of Crimea. It was also important for Moscow as South Korea was one pillar in the diversification of raw material trade away from Beijing. Even after the full scale invasion, Seoul was careful not to completely cut off ties with Moscow. South Korean companies continued having a presence in the Russian Market. It took Seoul another year to ban exports of dual-use products. South Korean companies have not even completely shuttered their Russian operations, enduring losses in production in their Russian Manufacturing plants. Their employees are still on the payroll in spite of production having come to a complete standstill. This agreement might finally push Seoul to crack the whip on its Multinational Companies to sell off all their assets in Russia. This is a massive loss for Russia in the Far East as South Korean investments were a very important alternative to dilution of Chinese influence in the region. The loss of South Korean investments make Russia all the more reliant on China which it has been trying to diversify through partnerships with other states like India, Turkiye, and South korea. Unlike Japan, where Russia has ongoing territorial disputes over the Kuril islands, relations with South Korea underwent a complete reset with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Seoul is also one of the few Western-allied states that has not supplied armaments to Ukraine directly.

An improved missile arsenal in North Korean hands is of great concern to South Korea and Japan in particular. These two states are under immediate threat of a North Korean attack. The fact that North Korea is also unpredictable and would be given access to more dangerous weapons increases the perceived threat that much more. There is a reason why most of the world has sanctioned North Korea and prevents it from purchasing new weapons systems. The technical support that Russia would supposedly provide is a violation of the sanctions regime that it had also previously endorsed in the UN Security Council. This significantly diminishes the trust that any state would now have on Moscow as an economic partner, especially when it is the neighborhood of Russia. This decision to pay such a public visit to Pyongyang will cost post-war Russia very dearly.

Conclusion:

Putin’s visit to Pyongyang has been extremely consequential for both the battlefields of Ukraine, and the Korean Peninsula. The Security agreement is a step in North Korean factories being roped in to assist the Russian War effort. It also opens the doors for North Korean soldiers to fight Ukraine. In the long term, it is a strategic blunder for Moscow as it has put into jeopardy its relatively warm relations with Seoul, and put extra pressure on the already strained relations with Tokyo. For Pyongyang, it is a major win. It now gets access to critical technology which will make it a more belligerent actor in East Asia, raising the costs for not Just Seoul and Tokyo, but also diminish Chinese influence, which is a good way to diversify its international partners.