Visit by Russia’s Shoigu to North Korea Stirs New Arms Fears
(Bloomberg) -- Russian Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu held talks in Pyongyang with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during a visit likely to stir concerns about arms transfers to aid the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine.
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Shoigu and Kim discussed a wide range of bilateral and international topics when they met Friday, according to a statement from the Security Council. The meeting is aimed at facilitating a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership treaty that Kim signed with Russian President Vladimir Putin in June, it said.
The visit is Shoigu’s second to North Korea in a little more than a year. As Russia’s then defense minister, he met Kim in July of 2023 and was given a tour of North Korea’s latest weapons, which included ballistic missiles that Ukraine and others said made their way to the battlefield a few months later.
Soon after that visit, satellite imagery showed increased trade between North Korea and Russia that the US and its partners said included millions of rounds of artillery shells as well as short-range ballistic missiles used to attack Ukraine.
The two also met when Kim visited Russia in September of that year.
Shoigu’s latest visit is part of a series of high-level interactions between the neighbors that included Putin’s first trip to North Korea in 24 years and the dispatch of a high-level military delegation to Pyongyang in July.
Kim also received that Russian delegation and pledged North Korean support for Moscow’s military operations in Ukraine, the official Korean Central News Agency reported.
In the agreement signed by Kim and Putin, the two sides pledged to come to each other’s defense if one is attacked. It bound the two US adversaries even closer and raised the risks of military action on the Korean Peninsula.
Kim holds vast stores of munitions that are interoperable with Soviet-era systems that Russia is using on the frontlines in Ukraine. In return for the weapons, Russia has supplied materials and technology that have propped up North Korea’s economy and advanced Kim’s development of arms, South Korean officials have said.
North Korea’s official media hasn’t yet reported Shoigu’s visit, but earlier this week Pyongyang conducted the test of a ballistic missile that it has shipped to Russia.
North Korea and Russia have denied the accusations of arms transfers despite a multitude of evidence showing them taking place.
(Updates with details of military cooperation in the seventh paragraph)
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