SEOUL, South Korea (AP) \u2014 North Korean leader Kim Jong Un\u00a0may travel to Russia<\/span>\u00a0for a summit with President Vladimir Putin, a U.S. official said, in a trip that would underscore deepening cooperation as the two isolated leaders are locked in separate confrontations with the U.S.U.S. officials also said that Russia is seeking to buy ammunition from North Korea to refill reserves drained by its\u00a0war in Ukraine<\/span>. In return, experts said, North Korea will likely want food and energy shipments and transfers of sophisticated weapons technologies.<\/p>A meeting with Putin would be Kim\u2019s first summit with a foreign leader since\u00a0<\/span>North Korea<\/span>\u00a0closed its borders in January 2020.\u00a0<\/span>They met for the first time i<\/span>\u00a0n April 2019, two months after Kim\u2019s high-stakes nuclear diplomacy with then-U.S. President Donald Trump collapsed.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n SEOUL, South Korea (AP) \u2014 North Korean leader Kim Jong Un\u00a0may travel to Russia\u00a0for a summit with President Vladimir Putin, a U.S. official said, in a trip that would underscore deepening cooperation as the two isolated leaders are locked in separate confrontations with the U.S.<\/p>\n\n\n\n U.S. officials also said that Russia is seeking to buy ammunition from North Korea to refill reserves drained by its\u00a0war in Ukraine. In return, experts said, North Korea will likely want food and energy shipments and transfers of sophisticated weapons technologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A meeting with Putin would be Kim\u2019s first summit with a foreign leader since\u00a0North Korea\u00a0closed its borders in January 2020.\u00a0They met for the first time i\u00a0n April 2019, two months after Kim\u2019s high-stakes nuclear diplomacy with then-U.S. President Donald Trump collapsed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s unclear how far Kim and Putin\u2019s military cooperation could go, but any sign of warming relations will worry rivals like the U.S. and South Korea. Russia seeks to quash a Ukrainian counteroffensive and prolong the war, while North Korea is extending a record pace of missile tests to protest U.S. moves to reinforce its military alliances with South Korea and Japan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here\u2019s a look at what Kim\u2019s possible trip to Russia would mean:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since last year, U.S. officials have suspected that North Korea is providing Russia with artillery shells, rockets and other ammunition, many of which are likely copies of\u00a0Soviet-era munitions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cRussia is in urgent need of (war supplies). If not, how could the defense minister of a powerful country at war come to a small country like North Korea?\u201d said Kim Taewoo, former head of Seoul\u2019s Korea Institute for National Unification. He said Shoigu was the first Russian defense minister to visit North Korea since the 1991 disintegration of the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Buying munitions from North Korea would be a violation of U.N. resolutions, supported by Russia, that ban all arms trade with the isolated country. But now that it faces international sanctions and export controls over its war in Ukraine, Russia has been seeking weapons from other sanctioned countries like North Korea and Iran.<\/p>\n\n\n\n North Korea has vast stores of munitions, but Du Hyeogn Cha, an analyst at Seoul\u2019s Asan Institute for Policy Studies, doubted whether it could swiftly send significant amounts to Russia, because the narrow land link between the countries can handle only a limited amount of rail traffic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kim\u2019s priorities would be aid shipments, prestige and military technology, experts said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt would be a \u2018win-win\u2019 deal for both, as Putin is cornered over his exhausted weapons inventory while Kim faces pressure from the South Korea-U.S.-Japan trilateral cooperation,\u201d said Nam Sung-wook, a former director of the Institute for National Security Strategy, a think tank run by South Korea\u2019s spy agency. \u201cTheir needs are matched perfectly now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pandemic-era border closures have left North Korea with severe economic difficulties, and Kim is likely to seek supplies of food and energy to address shortfalls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kim will likely also trumpet expanding relations with Moscow as a sign that the country is overcoming its years of isolation. North Korean leaders have long valued face-to-face meetings with world leaders as signs of international importance and for domestic propaganda purposes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kim is likely also seeking Russian technology to support his plans to build high-tech weapons systems such as powerful long-range missiles, hypersonic ballistic weapons, nuclear-powered submarines and spy satellites, said Hong Min, an analyst at Seoul\u2019s Korea Institute for National Unification.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s unclear whether Russia would be willing to provide North Korea with advanced technologies related to nuclear weapons and ICBMs, Cha said. Russia has always tightly guarded its most important weapons technologies, even from key partners like China, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Shoigu told reporters Monday that Russia and North Korea were pondering the possibility of bilateral military exercise. Earlier, South Korea\u2019s spy agency told lawmakers that Shoigu appeared to have proposed a trilateral training exercise involving China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Either way, it would be the North\u2019s first joint military drills with a foreign country since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War. The country has avoided training with a foreign military in line with its official \u201cjuche,\u201d or \u201cself-reliance,\u201d philosophy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kim Taewoo, the former institute director, said expanding South Korea-U.S.-Japan security cooperation could prompt Kim Jong Un to break that taboo and hold drills with Russia and China for the first time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But Nam, who is now a professor at Korea University, said North Korea won\u2019t likely accept the offer, as it could leave North Korea even more dependent on China and Russia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Park Won Gon, a professor at Seoul\u2019s Ewha Womans University, said it\u2019s too early to predict what Kim\u2019s diplomacy could yield beyond making a show of defiance toward the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn any case, North Korea and Russia need to show that they\u2019re working together, that they\u2019re stepping up this cooperation,\u201d Park said. \u201cThere clearly are practical areas of cooperation, and also some symbolic aspects they want to show to the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" SEOUL, South Korea (AP) \u2014 North Korean leader Kim Jong […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2762,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2761"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2761\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2763,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2761\/revisions\/2763"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}WHAT DOES RUSSIA WANT FROM NORTH KOREA?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
WHAT DOES KIM WANT IN RETURN?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
HOW CLOSE COULD THE TWO COUNTRIES GET?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n