North Korea will back Russia until it achieves victory in the Ukraine war, Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui said on Friday at talks in Moscow with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
“Our traditional, historically friendly relations, which have traveled the tested path of history, today … are rising to a new level of relations of invincible military comradeship,” she told Lavrov, praising the role played in this by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
She said Pyongyang had no doubt that under Putin’s “wise leadership” the Russian army and people would “achieve a great victory in their sacred struggle to protect the sovereign rights and security interests of their state.”
“And we also assure that until the day of victory we will firmly stand alongside our Russian comrades,” she said.
Greeting her, Lavrov spoke of the “very close ties” between the two countries’ militaries and said this enabled them to solve important security tasks together.
Neither referred to statements by the United States, NATO, South Korea and Ukraine this week that North Korea has sent some 10,000 troops to Russia. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said separately on Friday that he had “nothing to add to what has already been said” about such statements.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday that 8,000 of these were in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian troops broke across the border into Russia in August, and that he expected them to go into combat against Ukraine in the coming days.
“We are deeply grateful to our Korean friends for their principled position regarding the events that have now unfolded in Ukraine as a result of the West’s course of advancing NATO to the east and encouraging an openly racist regime to exterminate everything Russian,” Lavrov said.
“Very close contacts have been established between the military of the two countries and along the security services line – this also allows us to solve practically significant and important tasks for the security of our and your citizens.”
