Axis of outcasts: Putin and Kim’s cartoon summit

•  NINA L. KHRUSHCHEVA

MOSCOW: When North Korean leader Kim Jong-un stepped out of his armored train at a railway station in the eastern Russian town of Khasan for his recent meeting with President Vladimir Putin, I could not help but think of the satirical 2017 film The Death of Stalin. The miniature bridge from the platform to the station and the feeble red runner along which Kim strode stood in comical contrast to the military regiment lined up to greet him. The scene was practically cartoonish, as if Mickey Mouse had donned a suit to talk war with Donald Duck.

Of course, the artillery and weapons that Putin evidently wants from Kim are very real. So is Putin’s apparent sense that he doesn’t have too many international options.

Indeed, the summit with Kim came across as a sort of gambit – and a slap in the face for Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has worked for years to keep Kim in line and declared a “no-limits partnership” with Putin a month before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But whether Putin is actually offering Kim the deep and multifaceted relationship implied by the summit – which included a tour of Russian military facilities and the Vostochny Cosmodrome – remains doubtful.

During the Soviet Union’s waning years and in the early post-Soviet period, the Kremlin’s stance toward North Korea was rather condescending. The Soviets needed to keep the closed-off communist country within its sphere of client-states, in order to keep it from turning toward the then-unfriendly China, and they were glad to use reasonably cheap North Korean labor for industrial construction projects. But, as one researcher wrote in 1982, the bilateral relationship was “not as friendly nor as close” as it appeared.

That remains true today. To be sure, Putin visited Pyongyang in 2000, and in 2012, after Kim succeeded his father, Russia wrote off 90% of North Korea’s debt from the Soviet era, and vowed to invest in the impoverished country.

But investment has been limited, and the Kim regime’s commitment to developing nuclear weapons has been a diplomatic stumbling block. Russia’s demand for non-proliferation does not matter to Kim, who would rather endure heavy sanctions than abandon North Korea’s nuclear program.

Today, however, Putin’s calculations have changed. Russia is internationally isolated, an outcast state facing stringent sanctions and issuing nuclear threats, just as the hermit kingdom North Korea has been for decades. Moreover, Putin is trying to corral like-minded states in a kind of twenty-first-century Warsaw Pact, and North Korea – a steadfast antagonist of the West – is a key candidate. The stage appears set for a genuine axis of outcasts.

Not so fast. Economically, North Korea still has little to offer Russia. Most of the few goods it sells on the global market – coal and other minerals, seafood, and certain textiles – have no market in Russia, and the items Russia might want to import could not be produced in sufficient quantities. North Korea, for its part, cannot afford anything close to market prices for Russian goods.

Of course, the partnership heralded at the Putin-Kim summit is not primarily economic. The goal is military and technical cooperation, as well as Russian purchases of North Korean weapons supplies.

But antagonizing the West is one thing; openly violating United Nations Security Council resolutions, which strictly prohibit such exchanges with North Korea, would further weaken Russia’s position at the UN. Furthermore, Russia knows that North Korea will neither pay for nor reciprocate transfers of Russian military technology; the unscrupulous Kim might even sell it to other rogue states.

None of this will please China, which, despite supporting the North Korean regime, has grown weary of Kim’s constant saber-rattling. And while Putin wants to signal that Russia, too, is a major player in the region – Khasan is near China’s border – he hardly wants to make an enemy of Xi.

Nor would Russian military transfers to the Kim regime please South Korea – a country against which Putin now has something of a vendetta. And herein lies Putin’s biggest likely motivation for the summit with Kim. South Korea does not provide lethal aid to countries at war, such as Ukraine, as a matter of policy. But in recent months, the country has been delivering large quantities of artillery shells to the US to “replenish [American] stockpiles,” and pledged to increase its delivery of non-lethal military supplies and humanitarian aid to Ukraine.

By meeting with Kim, Putin seems to be warning South Korea – the world’s ninth-largest arms exporter – not to go any further. The implied threat is that if South Korea, which maintains generally good relations with Russia, bends to US pressure and starts delivering lethal aid to Ukraine, Russia will retaliate by transferring military technology to the North. North Korea does have one asset to offer Russia: labor. With a weakened ruble keeping Central Asian migrants away, many menial jobs in Russian cities cannot be filled. Imported North Korean labor can fill this gap. For Russia, the main benefit of the Putin-Kim summit may be limited to a steady supply of cleaning and construction workers.

Nina L. Khrushcheva, Professor of International Affairs at The New School, is the co-author of In Putin’s Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia’s Eleven Time Zones