North Korea has sent its Foreign Minister Choi Song-hee to Russia, making it the second trip to the key ally of the Kim Jong-un regime in less than a year. The move comes as Pyongyang prepares for a parliamentary session that is likely to adopt measures that will increase tensions with South Korea. Bloomberg writes about this, UNN reports .
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According to the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), Choi Son-hee led a delegation to attend conferences on women's rights. This is the foreign minister's first trip abroad since January, when she visited Moscow and held talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which the United States and its partners say facilitated the supply of weapons from North Korea to support the Kremlin's offensive in Ukraine.
The visit came after Russia sent Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu to Pyongyang last week for talks with Kim Jong-un. It was Shoigu's second trip to North Korea in a little over a year. As Russia's defense minister, Shoigu met with Kim in July 2023 and saw North Korea's latest weapons, including ballistic missiles that Ukraine and other countries say have subsequently made it to the battlefield.
The exchange of high-level delegations signals a deepening of cooperation between the neighbors, who have grown closer as Putin and Kim have been isolated by leading democracies. The United States and South Korea accuse Kim of sending millions of artillery shells and dozens of ballistic missiles to Putin in exchange for aid to support the North Korean economy and develop its weapons.
The head of Ukraine's military intelligence service noted that North Korean munitions shipments to Moscow pose serious problems for his country's defense as Russia continues its full-scale invasion for the third year in a row.
Russia's support has coincided with Kim's hardening stance toward Seoul and Washington. This includes statements of intent to remove the concept of peaceful reunification from the constitution, asserting rights to a disputed maritime border in the Yellow Sea, and claiming the right to destroy its neighbor on the divided peninsula.
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The North Korean parliament, known as the Supreme People's Assembly, will convene on October 7, KCNA reports. The meeting is expected to formalize changes to the constitution after Kim called for the elimination of the concept of “peaceful reunification” with South Korea at the previous session in January.
Kim has also sought to clearly delineate the borders, including the North Limit Line (NLL), which was established unilaterally by U.S.-led forces after the Korean War. The waters around the line have been the site of clashes, including a 2010 incident in which South Korea claimed that North Korea torpedoed one of its warships south of the line, killing 46 sailors.
The area around the islands in the Yellow Sea is one of the few places where armed conflicts between the two Koreas have taken place since the end of the 1950-1953 war, raising fears of a possible exchange of fire that could quickly escalate.
North Korea may also be considering a nuclear test closer to the time of the US presidential election to raise its profile, a senior South Korean official said in July, as Kim deploys new warheads capable of hitting the US and its allies in Asia.
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