North Korean state media, KCNA, reported on November 2 that the foreign ministers of North Korea and Russia have reaffirmed their strategic partnership. North Korea Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui and her Russian counterpart Sergei Viktorovich Lavrov held a summit in Moscow, despite concerns about Pyongyang’s involvement in the Russian-Ukrainian war. They met to go over the military provisions implemented by Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin earlier this year. 

In June of 2024, Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un met in Pyongyang and agreed to a partnership accord, detailing that their countries would provide military assistance to each other if either were attacked. The KCNA later published the full text of the pact, which also includes political, trade, investment, and security cooperation. According to the text, Article 4 states that should either country “get into a state of war due to an armed aggression” the other “shall immediately provide military and other assistance with all the means at its disposal.”

Political alliances between North Korea and Russia are not new. North Korea has consistently been in support of Russia since 2022, when Russia first invaded Ukraine. North Korea voted against the UN resolution that condemned Russia’s 2022 invasion and joined Russia in recognizing the Ukrainian regions of Luhansk and Donetsk as independent states. According to NPR, Russia has since paid the Kim regime back with a political favor, voting to disband a North Korea sanctions monitoring panel at the UN Security Council in March. In an analysis done by CNN, the June provision is the most significant agreement between Russia and North Korea in decades. It is seen as a kind of revival of their Cold War-era “mutual defense pledge” signed in 1961.

Detailed in an AP News report from November 4th, U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters that NATO and the government of South Korea have confirmed that up to 10,000 North Korean soldiers were in Russia’s Kursk region and were preparing to join the fight against Ukraine in the coming days. Moscow and Pyongyang have been vague in their response to South Korean and Western claims of the North Korean troop deployment to Russia. The partnered countries emphasize that their military cooperation complies with international law, without directly admitting the presence of the North Korean forces in Kursk. AP News also relays that both Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un have previously rejected assertions by the West that North Korea has given Russia ballistic missiles and millions of artillery shells for use in Ukraine.

But those who study North Korea, like think tanks in South Korea and the U.S., doubt the relationship will expand much further from the current transactions. In a quote from NPR, Cho Han-bum, a researcher at the Korea Institute for National Unification, theorizes that: “Once the war in Ukraine ends, North Korea will no longer be important to Russia.” The military transactions can elevate Kim’s stature in his own country and abroad, but only while Putin needs Kim’s support during the prolonged war in Ukraine. Additionally, it is in both of their best interests to not outwardly admit their current military cooperation, as the volume of trade between Russia and North Korea is minimal compared with Russia’s trade with South Korea or North Korea’s trade with China.

With an intensifying arms race and eroding of international norms, the West worries that bringing North Korea back to denuclearization negotiations will only get more difficult as long as the war in Ukraine rages on.