Metropolis Desk-
On Monday, Pyongyang and Moscow announced that Kim Jong Un will visit Russia at the request of his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, despite warnings from Washington that the two leaders might sign a weapons agreement.
The US government stated last week that such a meeting might occur as part of Russia’s efforts to recruit new manufacturers of the weaponry it will employ in its conflict with Ukraine.
Neither nation gave an exact date or location for the visit, nor did they provide any information regarding the subject matter of any potential face-to-face meetings. In a statement released on Monday, the Kremlin announced that Kim would make an official trip to Russia “in the coming days,” while North Korean state media stated the two would “meet and have a talk.”
But it seems likely that the two leaders will cross paths in Vladivostok, a location in the Far East, where they first met in April 2019. According to state TV Russia 24, Putin is supposed to have arrived in Vladivostok on Monday, according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. According to a South Korean government official speaking to CNN, Kim appears to be traveling to Russia by train.
Kim will be traveling abroad for the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic. As a result, North Korea’s borders have been closed for the majority of the last three years. As a result, travel restrictions have just recently started to ease.
It will also be Kim’s 10th trip overall since taking office in 2011. All of those occurred in 2018 and 2019, when the North Korean leader met with the then-US President Donald Trump three times, once in Singapore, once in Hanoi, and once in the DMZ that divides North and South Korea, to negotiate his nuclear and missile programs.
Over those two years, Kim also traveled to China four times to meet with Xi Jinping. The final trip was to the DMZ in 2018 to meet with Moon Jae-in, the president of South Korea at the time.
The distance between Vladivostok and the North Korean border is 130 kilometers (80 miles).
Like his father before him, the North Korean leader is known to prefer riding in an upmarket armored train, but less than half of his international travels are made by rail. The DMZ was the destination of two of the nine journeys, which were both undertaken by automobile.
Sergei Shoigu, the Russian defense minister, also went to Pyongyang in July to persuade the North Korean government to sell artillery ammo.
North Korea will “pay a price” if it signs an arms deal with Russia, the White House’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan said last Tuesday, though he did not go into further detail.
United Nations and US sanctions against North Korea have already been put in place as a result of Pyongyang’s WMD program.
The probable Putin-Kim summit may allow Pyongyang to acquire the kinds of weapons that the sanctions have prevented it from obtaining for the past 20 years, particularly for its ballistic missile program that is capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
The Russian military is battered, exhausted, and in need of supplies after more than a year and a half of fighting in Ukraine.
Source- CNN
