Russian president and Kim exchange ‘pent-up inmost thoughts’ on trip expected to deepen trade and security ties
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the war in Ukraine and today’s visit by Vladimir Putin to North Korea, where he is expected to seek further military support.
Relations between North Korea and Russia have “emerged as a strong strategic fortress” at a “crucial time”, North Korean state media has said as the Russian president arrived in Pyongyang for his first visit since 2000.
Putin praised North Korea for “firmly supporting” Moscow’s war in Ukraine, in an article published in the Rodong Sinmun, the newspaper of the ruling Workers’ party, on Tuesday. “We highly appreciate that [North Korea] is firmly supporting the special military operations of Russia being conducted in Ukraine,” the Russian leader wrote.
The Russian leader also commended Kim for defying UN security council sanctions – measures that were supported by Moscow until recently – targeting his regime’s nuclear ambitions. Pyongyang had defended its interests “very effectively, despite the US economic pressure, provocation, blackmail and military threats that have lasted for decades”, Putin wrote.
The US voiced concern that the visit could have security implications for Ukraine and the Korean peninsula, which has been shaken in recent days by friction along the heavily armed border that has separated North from South since the end of the 1950-53 Korean war. “We know North Korean ballistic missiles are still being used to hit Ukrainian targets (and) there could be some reciprocity here that could affect security on the Korean peninsula,” the US national security council spokesperson, John Kirby, told reporters.
Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said Putin’s trip showed he was “dependent” on authoritarian leaders. “Their closest friends and the biggest supporters of the Russian war effort – war of aggression – [are] North Korea, Iran and China,” he said.
A Kazkah opposition figure and prominent blogger with more than 1 million subscribers on YouTube has been seriously wounded in an attempted killing in Kyiv. Aydos Sadykov, who was granted asylum in Ukraine in 2014, was shot near his home and taken to hospital in a “serious condition”, his wife, Natalia Sadykova, said.
Ukrainian officials have already started preparatory work to organise a second peace summit, the Ukrainian president’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak said on Tuesday, after the first conference led by Ukraine was held last weekend in Switzerland. A summit hosted by Switzerland over the weekend saw over 90 countries attend, but Ukraine and its allies failed to persuade major non-aligned states to join their final statement, and no country came forward to host a sequel.
Ukraine claimed responsibility for an overnight drone attack on an oil facility in Russia’s Rostov region that started a massive blaze in the latest long-range strike by Kyiv’s forces on a border region.
Kyiv on Tuesday accused Russian forces of beheading a Ukrainian serviceman in the eastern Donetsk region, the latest allegation of abuse levied by Ukrainian prosecutors against Moscow. “While conducting aerial reconnaissance at one of the combat positions in the Donetsk region, the Ukrainian military discovered a damaged armoured vehicle of the Ukrainian Defence Forces. It contained the severed head of a Ukrainian defender,” the office of Ukraine’s prosecutor general posted on social media.