North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency said Russian President Vladimir Putin will pay a state visit on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is set to visit North Korea for a two-day visit this week, both countries announced on Monday after months of speculation and amid international concerns about their military cooperation.
Last year, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un . After that summit, Kim invited the Russian leader to visit Pyongyang.
North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency said Putin will pay a state visit on Tuesday and Wednesday. It did not immediately provide details. Russia confirmed the visit in a simultaneous announcement.
This will be Putin’s first trip to North Korea in 24 years. He first visited Pyongyang in July 2000, months after his first election when he met with Kim’s father, Kim Jong Il, who ruled the country then.
There are growing concerns about an arms arrangement in which Pyongyang provides Moscow with badly needed munitions to fuel Putin’s war in Ukraine in exchange for economic assistance and technology transfers that would enhance the threat posed by Kim’s nuclear weapons and missile program.
Military, economic and other cooperation between North Korea and Russia have sharply increased since Kim visited the Russian Far East in September for a meeting with Putin, their first since 2019.
U.S. and South Korean officials have accused the North of providing Russia with artillery, missiles and other military equipment to help prolong its fighting in Ukraine, possibly in return for key military technologies and aid. Both Pyongyang and Moscow have denied accusations about North Korean weapons transfers.
Any weapons trade with North Korea would be a violation of multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions that Russia, a permanent U.N. Security Council member, previously endorsed.
Andrei Lankov, an expert on North Korea at Kookmin University in Seoul, noted that in exchange for providing artillery munitions and short-range ballistic missiles, Pyongyang hopes to get higher-end weapons from Moscow.
