July 25, 2024: Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to North Korea recently was a masterpiece of revisionist history. During the visit Putin and North Korean leaders boasted of their long partnership, mutual friendship and cooperation in military matters. Before Putin arrived in North Korea, he wrote an article for a North Korean newspaper praising the long tradition of friendship and cooperation between the two countries. North Korea had recently sold weapons, including North Korean ballistic missiles, to Russia for use in Ukraine.

While Russia and North Korea glorified the long relationship between Russia and North Korea, the reality was that the two countries had stopped cooperating in the 1950s and their relationship did not go beyond maintaining embassies and ambassadors in each other’s capitals of Moscow and Pyongyang. It was Russian leader Joseph Stalin who ordered North Korea to invade South Korea in 1950, triggering a three year war where the South Koreans, backed by the United States and American allies defeated the initial North Korean attack and counterattacked with an operation that seemed likely to destroy the North Korean military and government and reunite Korea under a democratic, free market South Korean rule. Communist China and the Russian communist Soviet Union would not tolerate that and China sent in several hundred thousand soldiers they described as volunteers while Russia supplied large quantities of weapons and munitions. By 1953 this had caused a stalemate and both sides agreed to an armistice with the dividing line between the two Koreas being where troops of both sides were fighting a form of World War I trench warfare. This line was called the Demilitarized Zone. It was four kilometers wide and devoid of troops from either side. A garrison of American troops remained to ensure that the North Koreas did not restart the war and to restrain South Koreans who were still eager to reunite Korea. The armistice never turned into a peace treaty and technically the two Koreas are still at war. Currently

Since 1953 South Korea has created a functioning democracy and one of the top ten economies in the world. North Korea, still adhering to Juche, or self-reliance, and a North Korean form of socialism that had turned the country into a poverty stricken place where food, freedom and hope for a better future are all in short supply, By the 2020s the South Korean economy provided more benefits for its citizens that North Korea could provide for its subjects, The starkest evidence was the calculation that per capita income in South Korea was twenty times what it was in North Korea, and South Koreans could travel freely around the world and many have migrated to the United States and other Western countries, North Korea is a prison where leaving is unlawful and those who try and are caught are sent to labor camps for years as punishment. Many North Koreans do not survive a few years in a labor camp.

While life is arguably adequate in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, that is an anomaly because the rest of the country is mired in poverty with people willing to risk their lives to cross the border into Chia and eventually get to South Korea, which most North Koreans consider a prosperous place to be where the people speak Korean, although with a notably different accent than northerners. Fewer than 40,000 North Koreans have made it to South Korea since the 1990s, mainly because the border with China is guarded by North Korean troops with orders to shoot to kill anyone trying to leave North Korea.

Until recently there was little trade between North Korea and Russia. China has long been North Korea’s major trading partner. Even that was sometimes disrupted by the poor relations between the Kim dynasty in North Korea and the Chinese communist government. China has become the second largest trading nation, after the United States, in the world. This was because Chinese leaders decided to adopt free market economic rules in the 1980s. Chinese leaders proclaimed that it was not glorious to get rich, as long as you did not disobey your Chinese communist rulers.

There is no democracy in China but new leaders are chosen every five or ten years when senior Chinese officials decide among themselves who will be the supreme leader. For the last ten years that has been Xi Jinping, who has apparently decided to keep the job for life. That is working, so far. In North Korea there have been three generations of leaders belonging to the Kim family. Kim Il Sung, the first leader, was approved by the Soviet Union, where he had lived for several years. Kim spoke good Russian and not much Chinese. Kim Il Sung died in 1994 as North Korea was undergoing a famine that killed about ten percent of the population because, after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the generous aid the Soviets had long supplied ceased. North Korea refused to accept aid offered by South Korea because Kim Il Sung and his successor, Kim Jong Il (and son – North Korea is the world’s only Communist monarchy), continued the ruinous economic policies that continued to impoverish North Korea. Kim Jong Il died in 2011.

The only major accomplishment of Kim Jong Il’s rule was the development of nuclear weapons and more ballistic missiles to use against South Korea or the United States. North Korean leaders were not suicidal and knew that attacking South Korea with conventional or nuclear weapons would bring retaliation that would eliminate Kim family rule in the north. China was annoyed because the North Korean nuclear tests were conducted at an underground site near the Chinese border and China detected dangerous levels of radioactivity on their side of the border. The Chinese forcefully suggested that North Korea carry out its future underground nuclear tests far from the Chinese border.

In 2o11 Kim Jong Il died and was succeeded by his son Kim Jong Un, who had spent a lot of time living in the west and acquired a taste for the finer things in life. As a result, Kim Jong Un imported more luxury items for himself and his senior political and military associates. Kim Jong Un, like his predecessors, did little to improve the lives of most North Koreans and maintained a formidable secret police force to deter any violent protests of North Koreans.

Kim Jong Un was always alert to economic opportunities. When Russian leader Vladimir Putin came looking for weapons to use in Ukraine, Kim offered what North Korea had and would provide as much as Russia could pay for. That meant cash up front and not sales on credit. China would not sell Russia weapons but would provide non-military and dual-use items, as much as the Russians could afford.

The Chinese and North Korean weapons and military equipment were useful to Russia in Ukraine, but not decisive and the Russian are still losing lots of troops and find themselves trapped in a war they cannot win but cannot just abandon. Ukraine received, at no cost, over $100 billion in military aid from NATO countries that included the United States.

North Korea and Russia have both done poorly because of the war in Ukraine and the continued difference in living standards between North and South Koreans. Worse, South Korea has become a major supplier of modern weapons and has exported over $20 billion dollars of those weapons to NATO nations supporting Ukraine. This was with the understanding that these weapons would not be used in Ukraine. That was no problem because NATO countries like Poland sent weapons they already had to Ukraine and replaced them with new weapons from South Korea. Russia was not pleased with this but did not want to antagonize South Korea, which had become a major trading partner with Russia, or NATO countries, which were sending equipment but not troops to Ukraine. Russia did not want to go to war with NATO but was going broke paying for all those North Korean weapons while the Russian economy was suffering from the economic sanctions imposed by NATO countries for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.