North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and President Vladimir Putin arrived at a Russian space center for their first summit in four years, which the US said could focus on weapons deals that help the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine
Putin has arrived at the Vostochny Cosmodrome space center in the Amur region Wednesday, Interfax reported from the site, and Kim arrived after Putin, it said. Video from the center showed Kim in a suit stepping out of a limousine and shaking hands with Putin.
Shortly before the meeting, North Korea put on a display of force, firing two short-range ballistic missiles into waters off its east coast, South Korea’s military said. It was likely the first time North Korea has launched ballistic missiles with Kim out of the country.
The US has said that Kim and Putin are likely to discuss North Korea providing artillery and rockets to Russia for its war in Ukraine. Kim may be looking for food aid and technology to support his plans to deploy a nuclear-powered submarine and spy satellites.
The summit between the two leaders who have faced international isolation and sanctions marks the first time Kim has left the Korean Peninsula since 2019, when he held his only other summit with Putin in Vladivostok.
Photos released by North Korean state media show Kim is traveling with his foreign minister, top military officials and senior cadres in his weapons sector, indicating that munitions could be on the summit agenda.
Kim’s luxury armored train rolled into Russia on Tuesday. North Korea’s state media showed him in a suit stepping off the train in Khasan, where he was greeted by Russian officials at the city just across the border from North Korea.
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Kim was on a trip to put “relations of friendship and cooperation on a fresh higher level,” the official Korean Central News Agency reported Wednesday, without saying where Kim was headed after Khasan.
Putin spoke at a keynote session of his annual economic forum in the Russian port city of Vladivostok on Tuesday. He used that venue to call the legal cases former US President Donald Trump is facing “political persecution” that inadvertently benefits Russia by revealing the true face of its foes.
For months the US has accused North Korea of supplying munitions to help Putin’s war in Ukraine, something Moscow and Pyongyang have denied. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told a news briefing this week that “pariah” Putin is “traveling across his own country, hat in hand, to beg Kim Jong Un for military assistance.”
The most obvious items Pyongyang has and Moscow needs are artillery shells and rockets that Moscow can use in the Soviet-era weaponry it has pushed into action in Ukraine.
North Korea has some of the world’s largest supplies of munitions that are interoperable with Soviet-era systems, which Russia needs as it burns through its stocks of artillery shells. The US has said any supplies would not alter the course of the war and has told Pyongyang it would pay a price for any arms transfers.
North Korea has been busy churning out short-range ballistic missiles similar to some of the rockets Russia has used on Ukraine and which now appear to be in short supply. A transfer would mark a major elevation in cooperation, and the rockets would probably be sold at a high mark-up by Kim.
--With assistance from Eduard Gismatullin.
(Updates and recasts with arrival. A previous version corrected a caption in a photo.)