SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was scheduled to tour a Russian factory making fighter jets and visit the country’s Pacific Fleet. However, his exact whereabouts remained uncertain on Thursday following a summit at which he expressed unconditional support for Moscow.
Washington has warned that Wednesday’s summit between Kim and Russian President Vladimir Putin could lead to an agreement with North Korea to supply ammunition for Moscow’s war in Ukraine. There is widespread concern in Seoul that North Korea would receive advanced weapons technologies from Russia in return, including those related to military spy satellites, raising the threat of Kim’s military nuclear program.
“We express our deep concern and regret that North Korea and Russia discussed military cooperation issues, including satellite development, during their summit, despite repeated warnings from the international community,” South Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman Lim Soo-suk said.
“Any scientific and technological cooperation that contributes to the development of nuclear weapons and missiles, including satellite systems incorporating ballistic missile technologies, violates UN Security Council resolutions,” he said in a briefing.
Lim also noted that Kim’s delegation to Russia includes several people sanctioned by the Security Council for involvement in illegal North Korean weapons development activities, including Korean People’s Army Marshal Ri Pyong Chol and Jo Chun Yong, a ruling party official working for the ammunition policy is responsible. Lim said Moscow must be aware that if it continues military cooperation with North Korea, it will have a “very negative impact” on its relations with Seoul.
South Korean Unification Minister Kim Yung-ho, who is in charge of North Korea affairs, warned that possible arms transfers between the North and Russia would lead to stronger responses from South Korea, the United States and Japan, which have stepped up their trilateral security cooperation to deal with regional threats .
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Wednesday that North Korea would face consequences if it supplies Russia with weapons.
“No nation on the planet, no one, should help Mr. Putin kill innocent Ukrainians,” Kirby said. If the countries decide to move forward with an arms deal, the U.S. would review the agreement and “handle it appropriately,” he said.
He said any deal that would improve North Korea’s military capabilities “would certainly be of great importance to us.”
The world relies largely on Russian and North Korean media for information about Kim’s diplomacy in Russia, underscoring a convergent interest among the nuclear-armed countries that are in escalating tensions with the West.
A day after intensive coverage of the summit, the Russian media remained silent about Kim as of Thursday afternoon. North Korean state media was a day late in reporting on his activities in Russia, framing their reports to support the government’s propaganda needs.
North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency said on Thursday that Kim had invited Putin to visit North Korea at an “appropriate time” and that Putin accepted it with “pleasure” and reiterated his will to always carry forward the history of friendship between the nations.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed that Putin had accepted the invitation and said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was expected to visit North Korea in October.
Putin told Russian state television after the summit that Kim would travel on his own to two other cities in Russia’s Far East, fly to Komsomolsk-on-Amur, where he would tour an aircraft factory, and then head to Vladivostok to join the Russian Pacific Fleet to visit, a university and other facilities.
At their meeting on Wednesday at the Russian cosmodrome in the Far East, Kim Putin vowed “full and unconditional support” for what he described as a “just struggle against hegemonic forces in defense of his sovereign rights, security and interests” in an apparent reference to war in Ukraine.
The decision to meet at the Vostochny Cosmodrome suggested that Kim was seeking Russian help in developing military reconnaissance satellites. He has previously said they are crucial to increasing the threat from his nuclear-capable missiles. North Korea has repeatedly failed to put spy satellites into orbit.
The Komsomolsk-on-Amur aircraft plant would be another site that may hint at what Kim hopes to gain from Russia in return for supporting Putin’s war against Ukraine.
Some analysts wonder whether Russia, which has always closely guarded its sensitive weapons technologies, would be willing to share them with North Korea in return for potentially limited supplies of ammunition being slowly transported across its small land link.
They say military cooperation between the countries could focus more on conventional capabilities, such as Russia potentially helping North Korea improve its aging air force, which still relies on fighter jets that the Soviet Union used in in the 1980s.
Putin told reporters that Russia and North Korea have “many interesting projects” in areas such as transportation and agriculture and that Moscow is providing humanitarian aid to its neighbor. However, he avoided talking about military cooperation, saying only that Russia was abiding by sanctions that ban the acquisition of weapons from North Korea.
Wednesday’s meeting came hours after North Korea fired two ballistic missiles toward the sea, extending a highly provocative series of tests since 2022 as Kim used the distraction caused by the war in Ukraine to speed up his weapons development.
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Litvinova reported from Tallinn, Estonia. Associated Press journalists Hyung-jin Kim in Seoul, South Korea; Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo; and Jim Heintz in Tallinn contributed to this report.