The Hill – North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s first visit to Russia last week reaffirmed, above and beyond the traditional friendly ties between the two nations, the young Korean leader’s filial piety — a hallowed virtue in the Confucian civilization.
Kim did not quite make it to the birthplace of his father, Kim Jong Il, who was born in Vyatskoye, near Khabarovsk, some 500 miles north of the summit venue, Vladivostok. But in granting Russian President Vladimir Putin a face-to-face meeting, something that Putin sought for more than a year, Kim Jong Un gave Russia, just as his father did in the early 2000s, a seat at the table of high-stakes international politics.
Magnanimity known mostly as an alien custom among the top leadership of the (Despotic) People’s Republic of Korea, Kim’s gesture serves above all the DPRK. By showing the world he has friends beyond China and South Korea, Kim immediately acquires an additional layer of cover against United Nations sanctions implementation and also in the wake of the next big provocation. With the meeting, Kim has given back Russia its traditional role of a DPRK defender, a role that Russia played vigorously from 2000 up to the crescendo of provocations in 2016-2017, when outright defense of Pyongyang at the U.N. Security Council became impracticable.
