Kim Jong-un, seeking to escape international isolation, has found a willing partner in Russia’s Vladimir Putin and thereby revived Pyongyang’s Cold War art of pitting Moscow against Beijing, perfected by his grandfather Kim Il-sung. The collapse of the Soviet Union just prior to Kim Jong-un’s father’s ascent in 1994 ended the game for a time. But Kim Jong-il tilted a bit back toward Moscow after the arrival of Putin, and his son is doubling down. From plans for a joint military exercise to an invitation to visit from the Kremlin, a series of gifts have recently arrived in Pyongyang marked “from Russia with love.”
The three-year rule of neophyte leader Kim Jong-un has been marked by strained relations with Beijing, North Korea’s sole patron for the past two decades. Beijing was unhappy when a defiant Kim Jong-un conducted a third underground nuclear test in early 2013, and the Chinese supported additional U.N. sanctions—as did the Russians, although in a less vocal manner. Sino-North Korean estrangement reached its zenith in late 2013 when Kim publicly purged and then summarily executed his uncle Jang Song-thaek. Jang, widely seen as Beijing’s point man in Pyongyang, was condemned partly for economic crimes linked to Chinese interests. Beijing responded by continued snubbing of Kim. While Kim Jong-un has yet to be invited to Beijing, Chinese president Xi Jinping has been cultivating rival South Korean president Park Geun-hye, hosting her in Beijing and paying a return visit to Seoul.
Kim Jong-un, increasingly isolated, turned first to Tokyo. When repeated contacts with Tokyo in 2013 and 2014, including with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s special adviser Isao Iijima, failed to bear fruit, Kim then turned to Moscow. There he seems to have found a soulmate in Putin.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian president Boris Yeltsin chose to distance Moscow from North Korea, seeking to cultivate economic ties with South Korea. In a 1992 visit to Seoul, Yeltsin promised “to put pressure on North Korea to give up its effort to develop nuclear weapons,” reported the New York Times. Yeltsin “wanted to change or abrogate part of a 1961 treaty between the Soviet Union and North Korea calling for the two countries to aid each other in a war.” Pyongyang was left with Beijing as its sole ally.
Yeltsin used the occasion of a 1994 trip to Moscow by Kim Young-sam to present the South Korean president with 216 previously classified documents from the Soviet archives. The documents provided new evidence on North Korea’s invasion of South Korea on June 25, 1950, and close Soviet coordination of strategy with the North during the Korean War. (Kathryn Weathersby’s translation and documentation can be found in the Spring 1995 issue of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Cold War International History Project Bulletin.)
Tellingly, a June 26, 1950, top secret report from Soviet ambassador Terenti Shtykov in Pyongyang to Soviet Marshal Matvei Zakharov contained the following:
Documents such as this one largely laid to rest the revisionist interpretation of Korean War history put forward by leftist students and so-called progressives in South Korea. They had asserted that South Korean president Syngman Rhee, either singlehandedly or in consultation with his American ally, had conducted military probes that provoked a counterattack from the North. After Yeltsin released these documents, it was clear that Kim Il-sung, in collusion with Stalin, had launched an unprovoked attack on South Korea.
Yeltsin’s resignation in December 1999 ended this episode in North Korean-Russian relations. Kim Jong-il reportedly welcomed the arrival of Putin with the comment that Russia now had a leader “with whom we can do business.” A Treaty of Friendship, Good Neighborliness and Cooperation was signed in February 2000, and Putin first visited North Korea that July.
North Korea’s fear-of-flying leader Kim Jong-il reciprocated with two visits by train, traveling to Moscow in 2001 and to the Russian Far East a decade later. Russian military officials went to Pyongyang in August 2011 for talks that “would focus on the renewal of military cooperation between the countries, possible joint exercises ‘of a humanitarian nature’ and an exchange of friendly visits by Russian and North Korean ships,” the Itar-Tass news agency reported at the time.
So Kim Jong-un will be reviving a family tradition if he makes his first overseas visit as North Korea’s leader to Russia in May. Seoul’s Yonhap news agency, quoting a Kremlin spokesman, reported on January 27 that Kim had accepted an invitation to attend celebrations in May commemorating the Soviet victory in World War II: “About 20 state leaders have confirmed their attendance, and the North Korean leader is among them.”
Voice of America in a January 30 report speculated that the Russian trip is also a deliberate snub of Beijing: “The decision by the North Korean leader to go to Russia before visiting his chief ally China could indicate a breach in the Sino-Korean relationship.” Some diplomatic sources have indicated that Beijing, while irked at Kim, has decided, given its vital interests in the Korean peninsula, to invite Kim to Beijing at some point after his Russian visit.
Kim was already seen as hedging his bets when he sent trusted adviser Choe Ryong Hae, secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea, on an eight-day visit to Russia in November that included meetings with both Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Pyongyang reported that the talks were conducted in a “warm and friendly atmosphere.”
Choe’s mission may have entailed paving the way for the Kim Jong-un visit. According to Japan’s Asahi Shimbun, Choe’s visit made “significant progress in improving bilateral ties, suggesting that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un may visit Moscow for a summit, ahead of its longtime ally China.” Choe was also there, according to diplomatic sources, to assure that Moscow would stand firm in the U.N. Security Council in opposing a resolution suggesting that North Korea’s leaders be referred to the International Criminal Court for massive human rights violations. Russia, as expected, joined China in opposition to adding North Korea to the Security Council’s agenda. Lavrov explained Moscow’s opposition by stating that a U.N. organ-ization should “not become a judicial and prosecuting body.” Others saw Russia’s U.N. support as payback for Pyongyang’s opposition to a General Assembly resolution in March 2014 calling for nonrecognition of Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
Various gifts, besides the invitation to visit, have been forthcoming from Putin. NK News reports a steady flow of crude oil from the Russian Far East into North Korea during the new year. Reuters reported on January 28 that “Russia has pushed ahead with plans for natural gas and transport projects with the North in the hope of boosting gas exports to Asia and exporting coal to South Korea through an experimental consortium based in the North.” NK News on February 12 cited Vitali Survillo, chairman of the new Russian-North Korean bilateral business council, on Russia’s interest in developing North Korea’s roads, water, and electric infrastructure over the next 20 years in exchange for natural resources.
Military ties are also advancing. Voice of America reported on January 31 that Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff of the Russian Armed Forces, had announced plans to hold talks with North Korean Defense Ministry officials in order to prepare for joint military drills this year. Given the annual military exercises conducted on the peninsula by the United States and its South Korean ally, joint Russian-North Korean exercises seem intended to irritate Washington and reassert Russia’s interests as a Pacific power. Cho Han-bum of the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul said, “Russia and the North have common interests in that Russia wants to resist U.S. pressure and the North opposes the joint South Korea-U.S. exercises.”
As Kim Jong-un increasingly plays the Russian card, the message from Putin is loud and clear: Oil, coal, roads, infrastructure improvements, and joint military exercises all come from Russia with love.
Dennis P. Halpin, a former adviser on Asia policy to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is a visiting scholar at the U.S.-Korea Institute at SAIS (Johns Hopkins) and a consultant for the Poblete Analysis Group.
