[Looking for friendlier counterweights to the United States, Mr. Kim is making his first trip to Russia since taking the helm of his country and seeking to cultivate ties that date to the Soviet era. China and Russia have already voiced support for Mr. Kim’s gradual approach to disarmament and sanctions relief, something the summit meeting in Vladivostok seemed intended to highlight.]
By Andrew E. Kramer and Choe
Sang-Hun
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North
Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, center, speaking with Oleg Kozhemyako, the
governor of
the Russian region of Primorsky Krai, after arriving in Vladivostok,
Russia, Wednesday
CreditIgor Novikov/Press Office of the Primorye
Territory
Administration, via Associated Press
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MOSCOW
— Two months after a failed
summit meeting with President Trump, North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, was set
to meet on Thursday with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, as Mr. Kim
tries to rally international support for an approach to sanctions relief and
gradual nuclear disarmament that the Trump administration opposes.
Mr. Kim’s visit to the Pacific port city of
Vladivostok, Russia, is his first trip abroad since February, when he and Mr.
Trump met with much fanfare in Vietnam, only to see negotiations end abruptly,
amid mutual recriminations, without any progress toward an agreement.
At the talks in Hanoi, the Vietnamese
capital, Mr. Trump proposed a “big deal” to lift punishing economic sanctions
in return for a quick and complete elimination of North Korea’s nuclear weapons
program. Mr. Kim offered, instead, only a partial dismantling of nuclear
facilities — while keeping his arsenal of nuclear warheads and missiles — in
exchange for relief from the most harmful sanctions.
Each side called the other’s plan
unacceptable and the talks collapsed — a sharp contrast to the rosy picture both
leaders painted of their first meeting, last June, in Singapore.
North Korea has since vented its frustration
with Washington, conducting a weapons test and accusing Mr. Trump’s national
security adviser, John R. Bolton, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo of
sabotaging the nuclear negotiations. Mr. Kim said he was willing to meet Mr.
Trump again, but only if the president made a new proposal the North could
accept by the end of the year.
Looking for friendlier counterweights to the
United States, Mr. Kim is making his first trip to Russia since taking the helm
of his country and seeking to cultivate ties that date to the Soviet era. China
and Russia have already voiced support for Mr. Kim’s gradual approach to
disarmament and sanctions relief, something the summit meeting in Vladivostok
seemed intended to highlight.
Russian officials took pains to emphasize
they are not trying to undercut Mr. Trump, though Mr. Putin and his government
often seem to relish opportunities to thwart the international aims of the
United States and its allies. A Kremlin adviser, Yuri Ushakov, told Russian
news media on Wednesday that the meeting intended to “consolidate the positive
trends” of Mr. Trump’s talks.
Vedomosti, a Russian business newspaper,
noted that China has been muted in its backing of Mr. Kim, for fear of
upsetting trade talks with the United States.
Russia’s formal trade with North Korea is
minuscule, but it is seeking mining concessions and a long-desired trans-Korean
natural gas pipeline if international sanctions are lifted, said Vasily Kashin,
an East Asia expert at the Russian Academy of Sciences. Washington and Moscow
share an interest in avoiding a disastrous war on the Korean Peninsula, he
said, although the United States has expressed far more alarm over the years
about North Korea’s many threats to attack its neighbors.
“North Korea is immeasurably more important
for China than for Russia,” Mr. Kashin said.
Last year, the Trump administration
publicly accused Russia of helping North
Korea circumvent United Nations sanctions — which Russia voted for — through
illegal ship-to-ship transfers of oil and coal. The North does not want such
illicit dealings to stop, but Russia’s ability to ease the pain of sanctions is
limited.
North Korea and Russia share only a very
short border, in Russia’s sparsely populated far east, precluding the kind of
widespread smuggling said to be taking place on the border between the North
and China. Mr. Kim has met four times with President Xi Jinping of China,
seeking help from his country’s biggest trading partner, which accounts for
more than 93 percent of the North’s external trade.
But by meeting with Mr. Putin, Mr. Kim is
seeking to reaffirm his new image among his people as a global player, despite
what happened in Hanoi. His meeting with Mr. Putin also sends a signal to
Washington that Mr. Kim is expanding his diplomatic chess game after his
one-on-one diplomacy with Mr. Trump faltered.
“If perception is indeed reality, North Korea
has come to be perceived as now a player in Northeast Asia, meaning Kim’s
carefully calibrated P.R. offensive is working — much to Washington’s dismay,”
said Harry J. Kazianis, the director of Korean studies at the Washington-based
Center for the National Interest. “And in the long run, such a strategy could
very well pay off, if Kim is no longer perceived as a threat, leading
eventually to a weakened sanctions regime.”
With its talks with Washington stalemated,
Mr. Kim may try to align his country more closely with Beijing, Moscow or both,
as the United States tries to bring South Korea and Japan together to jointly
deter China’s ascendancy and a nuclear-armed North Korea.
If Mr. Kim concludes that his two-way
diplomacy with Mr. Trump is going nowhere, he may play on Mr. Putin’s desire to
increase his influence in the region. The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S.
Peskov, suggested Wednesday that Russia might welcome a revival of multilateral
talks on North Korea, known as the six-party negotiations, that have been
dormant for a decade.
“There are no other effective international
mechanisms at the moment,” Mr. Peskov said. “Therefore, it is not possible to
get completely detached from this mechanism. On the other hand, you know that
other countries are also applying their efforts to achieve settlement. All
efforts that really aim to denuclearize Korea and solve the two Koreas’ problem
should be supported.”
Before they collapsed in 2009, the six-party
talks had produced agreements to halt North Korea’s nuclear program, but the
North later abrogated them. The negotiations included China, Russia, Japan, the
United States, and North and South Korea.
Any attempt to revive them is bad news for
Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly cited them as the prime example of how past
administrations’ dealings with North Korea had failed. He has claimed that his
own leader-to-leader diplomacy with Mr. Kim stood a far better chance of
bringing about the North’s denuclearization.
Mr. Kim headed north into Russia on Wednesday
in his armored, green-painted train, which reportedly reaches a top speed of
only 37 miles per hour. Wearing a black coat and fedora, Mr. Kim stepped off
near the border for a traditional Russian greeting with bread and salt.
At the Vladivostok train station, Mr. Kim
disembarked onto a red carpet and was whisked away in his limousine. The visit
was so cloaked in secrecy that it was unclear where he spent the night.
Conspicuously absent from his entourage, as
reported on the North’s state media, was Kim Yong-chol, an official who has
been the North’s point man tasked with coordinating Kim-Trump diplomacy. Kim
Yong-chol’s absence came days after the North’s demand that Washington remove
Mr. Pompeo, his American counterpart, from the United States negotiating team.
Accompanying Mr. Kim to Vladivostok were
First Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui and other veterans of six-party talks.
Mr. Putin previously held a summit with Mr. Kim’s father and predecessor, Kim
Jong-il, in 2002. Kim Jong-il also met in 2011 with Dmitri A. Medvedev, then
the Russian president, in Ulan-Ude, a Siberian city near Mongolia.
