The Russian president Vladimir Putin and the North Korean leader Kim Jong they participated in a large demonstration in the main square of Pyongyang which effectively opened the summit between the two. Russian agencies report it. “The Russian president’s motorcade, led by the Aurus (limousine, ed.) in which Putin was travelling, headed towards Kim Il Sung square, writes Interfax, with Kim then greeting the Russian president before the talks.
Kim Jong-un welcomed Putin with full honors and a big red carpet, desperately looking for weapons and ammunition for his war on Ukraine, who landed in Pyongyang in the middle of the night and well behind schedule. “Our two countries have withstood the tests of history, generation after generation and century after century,” the respected marshal said in the KCNA report, speaking about relations between North Korea and Russia after Putin stepped off his plane. .
Kim “shaked Putin’s hand and hugged him warmly, expressing his joy and happiness to meet him again” after the summit at the Vostochny spaceport last September, the KCNA added. The two leaders went together in the same car to the Kumsusan State Guesthouse, crossing the streets of Pyongyang full of Russian and North Korean flags, welcome banners and giant posters of Putin.
Kim then presided over a high-profile welcoming ceremony, holding a military parade in Kim Il-sung Square in place of the expected simple honor guard parade. North Korean troops in full uniform, several hundred soldiers, marched goose-stepping under the two large portraits of the leaders, in a square filled with the colors of the two national flags and tens of thousands of people. After the ceremony, the tsar announced bilateral cooperation “based on the principles of equality and mutual respect of interests” because Russia and North Korea “have been linked for several decades by solid friendship and close neighborly relations.”
The Russian president told the North Korean leader that he “appreciates North Korea’s support” for Pyongyang’s Russian policy. “We greatly appreciate your systematic and permanent support for Russian policy, including on the Ukraine issue,” Putin said during a bilateral summit with Kim. Moscow, he added, according to Russian news agencies, is fighting “against decades of hegemonic and imperialist policies of the United States and its satellites against Russia”. Putin then invited Kim to visit Moscow and expressed the hope that the next summit could be held in the Russian capital, the Moscow agencies wrote, and highlighted that the strategic partnership treaty signed today between Russia and North Korea provides for mutual assistance in the event of aggression against one of the two countries.
Putin then argued that in his opinion the sanctions against North Korea launched by the UN Security Council (where Russia is a permanent member) should be “reviewed”. “I would like to emphasize that the UN Security Council’s indefinite restrictive regime towards” North Korea, “inspired by the United States and its allies, must be revised,” he said. For his part, the North Korean leader “praised Russia’s role in preserving the global strategic balance and expressed support for the special military operation” in Ukraine underlining that relations between Pyongyang and Moscow are entering a “new era of prosperity which cannot even be compared to the Korean-Soviet relations of the last century” and North Korea intends to strengthen its “strategic cooperation” with Russia.
The Tsar’s delay reduced his visit to the North to just one day. Putin was initially scheduled to arrive on Tuesday evening, but the Kremlin announced the landing in Pyongyang only in the middle of the night, delayed due to the previous stop in Yakutsk, a city in eastern Siberia. Putin is expected to attend an official banquet at midday and then hold a summit with Kim, before leaving for Hanoi, Vietnam, in the evening.
Putin has a consolidated reputation as a latecomer: in 2014, for example, he made German Chancellor Angela Merkel wait 4 hours and 15 minutes, while in 2018 it was the turn of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to wait 2 hours and 30 minutes. The tsar, however, was punctual nine months ago in his meeting with Kim in the Russian Far East.