North Korea has emphasized its ties with Russia.
The US also claims that Kim Jong-un is supporting Russian President Putin with arms sales.
Munich/Pyongyang/Moscow – The unity of the Europeans and their allies may sometimes convey a different picture – but Russia is not really isolated, even more than a year after the start of the Ukraine war.
There is the partnership with China, which steadfastly refuses to back down from the Kremlin.
Even states like India and Brazil are still not really distancing themselves from Moscow.
However, Russia has a very special ally in its immediate vicinity: North Korea, with which the world's largest country in terms of area shares a 17-kilometre border in its extreme south-east.
On Tuesday, the regime of dictator Kim Jong-un announced that it intends to further strengthen ties with Russia.
"The two countries are stepping up their mutual support and solidarity in the fight against the threat of war and external military threats," North Korea's Deputy Foreign Minister Im Chon-il said in a statement, quoted by the Russian news agency TASS.
He wished Russia "success in defending the country's legitimate security interests and in realizing the goal of building a powerful and prosperous state that resolutely resists the hegemony, tyranny and military threats of enemy forces."
Vladimir Putin regularly uses similar formulations to justify his war against Ukraine.
North Korea and Russia: united "in the fight against the common enemy"
The reason for Im's statements was the fourth anniversary of a meeting between Kim Jong-un and Putin in Vladivostok in April 2019, the first and so far last personal encounter between the two rulers.
On the occasion of the anniversary, the Russian ambassador Alexandr Matsegora visited an elite school in North Korea's capital Pyongyang, as the North Korean news agency KCNA wrote.
In Moscow, according to TASS, Pyongyang's ambassador Sin Hong-chol also said that the friendship between the two states "developed in the spirit of military camaraderie in the fight against a common enemy" - such formulations usually mean the USA.
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In April 2019, Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin met in person for the first and last time.
© Valery Melnikov/TASS
In the United Nations, North Korea was one of the few countries to always vote against resolutions calling for an end to the war, most recently on the anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
In addition, last July Pyongyang recognized the two separatist regions of Luhansk and Donetsk as independent, which led to the end of diplomatic relations with Kiev.
North Korea supports Russia with weapons in the Ukraine war?
Whether the Kim regime is also actively supporting Russia in the Ukraine war remains to be seen.
In January, the United States accused North Korea of supplying weapons to Yevgeny Prigozhin's paramilitary Wagner group - Kwon Jong Gun, Pyongyang's director general of the Department of US Affairs, then spoke of the "invention of a non-existent thing", according to state media.
In support of its claims, the US produced photographs purporting to show Russian railroad cars entering North Korean territory, loading infantry missiles and other missiles there, and returning to Russia.
At the end of March, the United States also announced that Russia was trying to get more weapons from North Korea.
"We have new information that Russia is actively trying to acquire additional ammunition from North Korea," said US National Security Council communications director John Kirby.
An arms dealer named Ashot Mkrtychev is trying to broker a secret arms deal with the Kim regime, Kirby said.
North Korea is arming itself massively under Kim Jong-un
It is undisputed that Pyongyang has been massively armament for several years - although the country is completely impoverished, the population suffers from malnutrition and North Korea has also sealed itself off from abroad since the beginning of the corona pandemic.
Since taking power in 2011, Kim Jong-un has had six nuclear tests carried out, most recently in September 2017. North Korea is also constantly developing new ICBMs, although UN resolutions actually prohibit this.
A solid-fuel ICBM was tested for the first time in mid-April.
In order to stop North Korea's rearmament, the country was hit with a large number of sanctions.
When the United Nations wanted to increase the pressure on Pyongyang with further punitive measures in May last year, the push failed because of China - and Russia.
The stance of the governments in Beijing and Moscow, said US representative at the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield recently, encourages North Korea to "shoot down ballistic missiles with impunity" and to pursue the development of sophisticated and dangerous weapons.
Rubric list image: © Valery Melnikov/TASS
