North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, vowed to expand military cooperation with Moscow in its confrontation with the US as the Russian defence minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, led a delegation to Pyongyang, the North Korean state news media reported on Thursday.
During a meeting on Wednesday, Kim and Shoigu discussed increasing “strategic and tactical collaboration and cooperation” in national security “to cope with the ever-changing regional and international security environment”, the North’s official Korean Central News Agency said on Thursday.
The news agency did not directly mention Russia’s war in Ukraine. But in a separate meeting with Shoigu on Wednesday, Kim’s defence minister, Kang Sun Nam, identified the US as a “common enemy” of their two countries.
“The present conflicting international military and political situation requires the armies of the two countries to resolutely stand against” the United States “and further strengthen their mutual cooperation and collaboration,” Kang was quoted as saying.
Shoigu led his delegation to Pyongyang to celebrate the 70th anniversary on Thursday of the 1953 armistice that halted the three-year Korean War. It came on the same day that President Vladimir V. Putin opened a summit with African leaders in St Petersburg, another effort by Russia to demonstrate its international ties as it grows more isolated from western countries over its invasion of Ukraine.
The White House has accused North Korea of supplying infantry rockets and missiles to Russia for use in Ukraine.
Russia helped instal a Communist government in the northern half of the Korean Peninsula at the end of World War II and supported its invasion of the pro-US South to start the Korean War in 1950. Although the war ended in a truce, North Korea celebrates the armistice day as a “war victory day”.
