SAfter successive meetings between their leaders since September, the new understanding between Moscow and Pyongyang is taking on a strategic dimension whose effects will be felt both in Eastern Europe (on the Ukrainian front) and in North-East Asia. (rising tensions on the Korean peninsula).
Cooperation between the two countries goes beyond the delivery of arms by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) to Russia: it extends to technological assistance from Moscow to the Pyongyang regime, as evidenced by the recent into orbit, successful after two failures, of a North Korean spy satellite.
It also includes bilateral economic cooperation, including a project for the joint exploitation of rare earths – that is to say strategic metals used in the manufacture of high-tech products, including weapons –, the northern deposits Koreans among the richest in the world. All in violation of United Nations (UN) resolutions.
The issue of rare earths
The meeting, in September in Vladivostok, of Vladimir Putin and leader Kim Jong-un, preceded by the visit to Pyongyang of the Russian Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, and followed, in October, by that of his foreign affairs counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, demonstrate the desire of the two countries to consolidate their ties. Moscow sees the DPRK as an arms supplier and a partner in its opposition to NATO expansion in the Indo-Pacific region, while Pyongyang hopes for transfers of Russian technology and a strengthening of economic ties between the two countries. .
Arms deliveries to Russia by the DPRK were the most commented topic in the Western camp. According to the White House, “a thousand containers of military equipment and ammunition were delivered to Russia in October”. These deliveries have not been confirmed, but “Moscow has no problem arguing that, as the West supplies arms to Ukraine, it has the right to obtain some from its own allies”estimates Rüdiger Frank, director of the Center for North Korea Studies at the University of Vienna.
These deliveries are in some way a counterpart to those of South Korea, which supplies arms to Poland, a member of NATO and an ally of Kiev, part of which there is every reason to believe is secretly passed into Ukraine: Seoul refuses to supply weapons to kyiv, but does not prohibit its clients from transferring them.
Arms deliveries to Russia will boost production in North Korea’s arms industry, a key sector both in terms of jobs and economic weight. With 180 production units, the arms industry employs two million workers (out of twenty-six million inhabitants). But the effect on the rest of the economy is likely to be modest: armaments are the domain of the army, largely autonomous.
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