The North Korean leader defined the war that Russia is waging in Ukraine as a “sacred war against the West.” Kim Jong-un spoke in these terms at the summit, which seems like a new stroke in the geopolitical redesign of the world. Speaking like this seems more typical of an Iranian ayatollah or a Sunni jihadist, than of the leader of the last communist totalitarianism that exists. Nothing more opposite to Marx’s dialectical materialism and the transition from him to the praxis executed by Lenin. In North Korea, the author of Capital and the ideologist of the Bolshevik revolution are still worshiped, but their rulers are also sacralized as divinities anointed by the gods of Mount Paektu. In Siberia, Kim Jong-un proclaimed that he will always be with Russia in that “sacred war.” Putin listened to him smiling. What did not make the Russian president smile were the joint military exercises that North American and Armenian troops carried out, in those same days, in the Transcaucasian country.
For Moscow, Armenia inviting the American army is tantamount to betraying the old friendship between Yerevan and Moscow. A link that dates back to the end of the 19th century, when Armenians found refuge in Russia from the pogroms and massacres that they began to suffer under the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. Many Armenians supported Russia when it faced the Ottoman Empire in World War I. They saw in Moscow the possibility of independence and supported the revolution, while the Young Turk regime continued to exterminate them. Stepan Shaumián was an Armenian fighter who fought against tsarism and, in his honor, the capital of the Nagorno Karabakh Oblast was named after him, calling it Stepanakert. That territory has been inhabited by Armenians since the remote times of the Achaemenid Empire. But Stalin put it under the sovereignty of Azerbaijan, leaving it as an Armenian enclave within a Turkmen and Muslim state.
The friendship between Moscow and Yerevan continued after the dissolution of the USSR and benefited Armenia in the conflict with Azerbaijan, which broke out in 1988 and ended five years later with the Armenian triumph and the proclamation of Artsakh as an independent territory from Baku. But the drift of the head of the Kremlin distanced him from the Armenians, making possible the triumph of the Azeri offensive of 2020, and now making possible the genocidal blockade that Azerbaijan is applying in the Lachin corridor.
In 2020, the Armenians lost territories surrounding the enclave that they had put under their control in the previous armed conflict. Even more serious, they lost part of Nagorno Karabakh, including Shusha, the second most important and populated city. That is why they began a geopolitical turn by approaching the United States, while Putin received the North Korean leader. Kim Jong-un’s trip to Siberia and his meeting with the Russian president were more important than his previous trips and summits. The two meetings with Donald Trump in 2019 were very colorful. The media around the world devoted much more space to those meetings in the demilitarized zone of the 38th Parallel and later in Hanoi. But they were as spectacular as they were empty. Kim only managed to be a protagonist in the international press and Trump achieved absolutely nothing. On the other hand, this summit with Putin may be more relevant than the one he had with Xi Jinping in Beijing and also than the meeting of his father, Kim Jong-il, in 2010, with the then Russian president Dmitri Medvediev.
Probably, this trip to Russia to meet with Vladimir Putin is equivalent to the one his grandfather made to Moscow in 1949. On that trip, Kim Il-sung asked Stalin for weapons and ammunition to cross the 38th Parallel to destroy the South Korean state. Stalin gave him what he required and, in 1950, North Korean forces advanced south, going to war with a multinational army commanded by General Douglas MacArthur.
At this summit, once again the issue was the supply of weapons and ammunition. But now it is Russia that needs them. Putin asked Kim Jong-un for artillery ammunition, howitzers and anti-tank shells to continue fighting the Ukrainians. Ukraine is also running out of ammunition and Zelensky is touring allied countries demanding that they supply him. Whoever manages to obtain large quantities of ammunition first will take advantage in this conflict that is bogged down. The munitions that North Korea possesses are outdated and are estimated to have a yield of 80%. An insufficiency that Russia can put aside due to the great need for supplies imposed by the war in Ukraine.
The Putin-Kim meeting was the opposite of the 1949 summit. This time Russia is the one that needs North Korean assistance and that creates an opportunity that Kim Jong-un did not miss. That is why he traveled in his armored train to Siberia and dramatized the relevance that the Russian constraints give to his lunatic regime. By the way, in exchange for the ammunition, Kim will have asked for what his father and grandfather asked for so many times: food for a population several times decimated by famines since the mid-20th century. But he surely asked for more. And the place where he met Putin suggests a possibility that keeps Japanese, South Koreans and Americans up at night. The summit took place at the Vostochni Cosmodrome, which this Kremlin chief had built because the Soviet Baikonur Cosmodrome is in Kazakhstan and was in the power of the Kazakh State after the dissolution of the USSR.
The countries that surround North Korea and see the ballistic missiles that the regime constantly tests pass over their heads do not doubt that Kim Jong-un will have asked Russia for advanced missile technology. The North Koreans have missiles but, in this matter, Russian technology has advanced to the hypersonic missiles that it is launching in Ukraine. This agreement between Kim Jong-un and Putin seems to take the Russian-North Korean relationship to a higher level. At this new level, unprecedented things can happen, such as joint military maneuvers. North Korea never held exercises with either Russia or China, because the Juche Doctrine imposes “self-sufficiency” in all areas, a hoax that never worked but was always staged through military power.
The fact is that the summit in Vostochni finishes burying the stage in which Russia signed the international treaty that tried to stop the North Korean weapons program. Now, the world’s last communist regime and Vladimir Putin’s Russia come together to wage “the sacred war against the West.”
