Putin's visit to North Korea to meet with Kim Jong-un: a dictator on the international fringe strugg

   Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Pyongyang in the early morning hours of June 19, Pyongyang time, kicking off his visit to North Korea. Before Putin arrived at the airport, Kim Jong-un paced the airport tarmac in advance and waited. Putin was given a grand welcome at the airport as he disembarked, with Kim Jong-un enthusiastically coming forward to shake hands and embrace him, and the two of them acting quite close to each other as they pushed each other out of the way as they boarded the car they shared.

   On the morning of the 19th, the DPRK and Russian delegations had an official meeting, which was attended not only by Putin and Kim Jong-un, but also by the Prime Ministers/Vice Prime Ministers, Foreign Ministers, and key members of the Cabinet of both sides, as well as top party cadres of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK).

  In addition, North Korea has made elaborate and grandiose arrangements to welcome Putin to the country. In Pyongyang, which has almost no foreign elements, Russian flags were displayed everywhere, from roads and bridges to skyscrapers, along with Russian-language banners welcoming Putin's arrival, and at noon on June 19, a military parade was held in Putin's honor. In front of the Palace of the Sun on Mount Kumhosu, where the Russian and North Korean flags are hoisted, Putin and Kim Jong-un walked through the welcoming crowds and laughed together.

In the afternoon of the 19th, the parties signed the Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between Russia and the DPRK, which contains a provision of a military alliance nature "to assist one party in the event of an attack on the other party".

   This Russia-North Korea/Putin-Kim meeting comes at a time when the Russia-Ukraine war is stalemate and critical, quite concerning. And just a few days ago, a Western-led peace summit on Ukraine was held in Switzerland with the participation of more than 90 countries, with a tone of support for Ukraine and condemnation of Russia. Japan and South Korea in Northeast Asia have been warming up rapidly since Yoon Seok-hyeol came to power, and the U.S.-Japan-South Korea triple alliance has been strengthened, with North Korea, Russia and China as the target of its confrontation. At the same time, China and the United States, Japan and the Philippines and other countries in the South China Sea conflict, the Taiwan Strait situation is also increasingly tense.

    Against this backdrop, Putin's motives for visiting North Korea and the reasons for Kim Jong-un's warm welcome to Putin are clear. In the face of the West's siege, their own increasingly isolated situation, the two sides of the embrace of warmth is logical.

   But the siege and isolation of Russia and North Korea is ultimately the result of the authoritarian dictatorship of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un at home and their aggression against other countries.

   Vladimir Putin, who has held the highest power in Russia for 25 years, has basically destroyed Russia's liberal democracy over the years, turning the country into a degenerate state dominated by Putin, which is still liberal and democratic on the surface, but is actually full of corruption and violence. When Putin first came to power, he won the war in Chechnya by means of irony, and encountered the 9/11 incident and the rise in international oil prices on Russia's favor, the support rate climbed all the way up, from the unheard of former KGB agents, transformed into the hope of the revival of Russia.

   But Putin used the popularity and power tactics to seize power, then gradually the 1990s Russia's booming liberal democracy weakened, strengthen personal power, the promotion of the cult of personality. Putin has cracked down on the oligarchs and punished many corrupt officials, but has fostered oligarchs who support him and corrupt officials who are loyal to him. Putin has gone to great lengths to detain and assassinate institutionalized opponents, as well as media journalists, who dare to challenge his authority.

   Many Chinese, seeing Putin's iron grip on the country, think that he will bring stability and development. In fact, under Putin's rule, corruption is rampant, law and order is chaotic, and authoritarian dictatorship has only suppressed civil rights and freedoms, and has not brought about economic development and improvement of people's livelihood. On the contrary, Putin has been in power for more than two decades, and Russia's GDP is now equivalent to the output value of only one province, Guangdong. The structure of the Russian economy is also deformed, with a high dependence on individual industries such as energy and the military industry, a lack of innovation and dynamism, and a large land mass and vast resources, with the majority of Russians remaining impoverished.

   Under the pressure of internal dilemmas, Putin tries to divert conflicts and enlist people's support with external expansion. The invasion of Ukraine was part of Putin's foreign aggression. However, Putin did not expect Ukraine's resistance to be tenacious and Western assistance to be strong, but instead the Russian army was full of holes. Putin's invasion of Ukraine has also made Russia more isolated. Putin, personally, is facing external sanctions and domestic discontent, and in the event of defeat, he fears that he will be brought to trial, or even die in a coup d'état or foreign attack.

   The other party to this meeting, North Korea's supreme leader, Kim Jong-un, is also a dictator, and more dictatorial and more brutal in his rule. Starting with his grandfather, Kim Il Sung, three generations of the Kim family have built a red hereditary system in North Korea that is unrivaled in the world today. It survives solely on bottomless violence, physical control of the entire population, and constant political purges. Millions of people have been executed and thrown into concentration camps since the 1950s to the present day, not including during the Korean War.

   In the 1990s, North Korea, with its highly totalitarian, rigid political and economic system and the loss of most aid from the Soviet Union and China, saw its economy collapse and a famine (known in North Korea as the "March of Misery") in which more than a million people died. Survivors are also generally mired in abject poverty. North Korea barely survived the famine with food aid from South Korea, the U.S., China, and other foreign countries, and after Kim Dae-jung was elected president of South Korea in 1997, he launched the "Sunshine Policy," a series of aid programs for North Korea. For a time, North Korea also partially liberalized its domestic free market, as well as opened up somewhat to the outside world.

  But after that, the Kim regime in North Korea did not really reform and open up like China, but instead took advantage of the respite to consolidate the rule of the Workers' Party, develop nuclear weapons, and conduct multiple nuclear tests in 2006 and beyond. The reason why the DPRK has given up on reform and opening up and has turned its back on the international community is that the Kim family, which rules the DPRK, is afraid of losing its power after opening up, and prefers to let the DPRK continue to live in despotism, poverty, and international isolation for the sake of its own privileges and its own life.

   In the last two years, North Korea's already poor economy and livelihoods have deteriorated again, and in early 2024, when famine struck again, the Workers' Party officially admitted that the rationing system had collapsed. Compared with the completely closed Kim Il-sung era, many North Koreans have learned more about the outside world, no longer listen to official propaganda, the Kim family rule more and more unstable. The warming of relations between Japan and South Korea and the consolidation of the U.S.-Japan-South Korea alliance made the North Korean side (or rather Kim Jong-un and his close associates) feel even more at risk.

   As a result, Russian-North Korean relations (or more accurately, Pu-Kim relations) heated up rapidly. During the Russo-Ukrainian war, North Korea supplied Russia with a large stockpile of artillery shells and other weapons and ammunition. Last September, Kim Jong-un traveled to the Russian Far East to meet with Putin. And Putin's visit to Pyongyang is both a return visit and a partnership between two dictators struggling to preserve their privileges and save their families from death at a time of heightened international tensions and solidarity with their Western allies.

   Both of these dictators have done evil and killed and maimed their people. And now, they have to hold both countries and all the people hostage, making the common people pay for their own ambitions, privileges, and bodies, their labor, their wealth, and even their deaths in war. And it was not the United States, Europe and NATO that started the international marginalization of the two countries, Russia and North Korea, but Putin and the three generations of the Kim family.

   Although these two dictators are holding two countries hostage and forming an alliance in an attempt to confront the liberal democratic camp, the actual effects and harms need to be overestimated. Russia and North Korea, under the authoritarian dictatorships of the two men, were economically impoverished and in decline, and even the militaries that they had concentrated on securing were riddled with leaks. North Korea, in particular, is incapable of going to war with South Korea (let alone with the US and Japan) except for a whole bunch of broken weapons and ammo from the 1950s-70s. And its nuclear weapons do not have the ability to actually be projected, and whether they are attempted using airplanes or missiles, they will be destroyed by the US, Japan and South Korea before they can be used.

  Although Russia is still able to fight, it has suffered setbacks on the battlefield in Ukraine, and the number of dead and wounded is believed to have reached 500,000 people. Even if North Korea were to throw its weight behind it, it would not increase the Russian army's combat power much.

   It is true, however, that the Russians might send troops to support North Korea if it goes rogue. But with the Russian army already suffering heavy losses in Eastern Europe, it is still a question mark whether it is still strong enough to engage the US, Japan and South Korea on the Eastern Front. Still, if Russian forces are invited by Kim Jong-un in the future to suppress an army rebellion and popular uprising within North Korea, the possibilities are high. If the South Korean army does not intervene in time, and the Kim regime does not end quickly, the Russian army may indeed enter North Korea. And if US forces intervene and don't win immediately, it could also give the Russians an excuse to go into North Korea. China may also send troops. The international community, especially South Korea, should seriously consider and plan for this possibility.

   But even if Putin and Kim Jong-un have more cooperation and devote the full power of both countries, they will not be able to resist the international trend. The two countries' weak national strengths, especially their weak economies, cannot support their ambitions against the West. And their domestic crisis is also in full swing. Their mutual friend, China, is more likely to stay away or provide limited support than to get involved in the polarizing domestic and diplomatic activities of the Pukin duo. Moreover, the rulers of the Communist Party of China (CPC) are also facing various internal and external crises. China's focus on economic development also means it is unwilling to risk direct war with the West. If the North Korean regime topples, the Communist Party of China might do something to intervene, but it is unlikely to send troops in support as it did in the 1950s.

   Putin will also travel to Vietnam immediately after his current visit to North Korea. Vietnam is also the closest ally of the former Soviet Union and Russia in Southeast Asia. In the 1960s and 1980s, the Soviet Union and Vietnam had a traditional friendship against the United States and also against China. The Soviet Union had its only military base in Vietnam in Southeast Asia, Cam Ranh Bay. Russia, which succeeded the Soviet Union, abandoned it due to lack of funds, but in recent years has made several attempts to re-lease Cam Ranh Bay.

However, Putin will have very little to gain in Vietnam compared to the warm welcome and close alliance he received in North Korea. Vietnam is also working with the US, Japan, Europe and other Western countries today, trying to fish between the West, China, India and Russia, unwilling to choose sides. Moreover, Russia is the worst off economically and the hardest to give strong assistance to Vietnam compared to many other parties, and it also has a bad reputation for invading Ukraine. While the Vietcong regime of Nguyen Phu Trong also needs the support of other dictators, the priority is still economic development. So Vietnam will not get too close to Russia, and Putin's visit to Vietnam will be conducted nonchalantly and end without much substantive results.

   At the moment, Putin and Kim Jong-un can be said to be at the end of their rope, but they are trapped. They are poisoning their citizens internally and jeopardizing world peace and democracy externally for their own selfish interests. Putin started the Russo-Ukrainian war, which has even led to the deaths and injuries of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians, and the displacement of millions of Ukrainians. The two men's rule has long reached the point where it needs to end. And they are to be blamed for their own demise, and should have thought that they would not be able to end well when they were killing and maiming their people.

   The international community should not sit idly by while these two dictatorial hooligans continue to jeopardize their own countries and the people of the world. Instead, it should take all necessary measures to put an end to their rule at the earliest possible time, and return freedom and democracy to the Russian and North Korean people, as well as peace to the world. Those in power in China should follow the trend of justice, refrain from acting as accomplices to tigers, and play a positive rather than an obstructive role in the transition of Russia and North Korea from authoritarian tyranny to freedom and democracy, which is also a way to do good for themselves and leave a way out for their own future and that of their descendants.