Paper sunflowers, which in Asia are a symbol of longevity and good luck – in Taiwan the sign of recognition of the anti-government protests of 2014, but to this the protocol of Kim Jong Un he must not have thought about it. Crowds cheering along thirty kilometers of road as the Russian president’s motorcade passes by Vladimir Putin (according to Rossiya’s envoy) to Pyongyang. Happy children with shorts of the same colors of the two flags, either red or white or blue.
Lots of balloons, flags, bouquets of flowers. Choreographies and turns. A military parade, but without means. The welcome given to Putin in Kim Il-sung Square is festive but with the faded colors of an old Soviet film. The band in fact sings “Great is my homeland”with the lines “I know of no other country where man breathes with so much freedom” and “at our table no one is excluded, everyone is recognized for their merit, in golden letters we write, the law of Stalin’s people”, composed in 1936 for the film “Circus” and used as the theme song for Radio Moscow during the war (the reference to Stalin was deleted in the Khrushchevian era, today who knows).
The Russian President he parades through the streets of the city standing in an open limousine, with Kim Jong-un next to him. Putin and Kim compliment each other about who should get into the car first. Putin has the upper hand. At the end of their conversation at Geumsusan, the Russian President has no hesitations and decisively climbs into the driving seat of an Aurus, Kim in the passenger seat (VIDEO). At high speed they cross a park. The car stops and the two get out to walk for a while. Kim, Tass recalls, owns at least two Russian-made Aurus, the first acquired after his visit to the Vostochny cosmodrome last year, an opportunity to also bring home Russian space technology, the second now brought by Putin as a gift.
Putin – accompanied to Pyongyang by the deputy prime minister, Denis Belousov and the foreign and defense ministers, Sergei Lavrov and Sergei Shoigu – and Kim signed a comprehensive strategic partnership agreement and “several other important documents”, according to Tass. The Treaty takes bilateral relations “to a new level”, with the promise of “mutual assistance in the event of aggression against one of the two parties”. The Russian agency explicitly refers to the statements of the USA and other NATO countries on the supply of precision offensive systems to strike Russian territory.
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“It’s not just words, it’s already happening, in gross violation of the limits accepted by Western countries within the framework of the various international commitments undertaken”, reports the agency, maintaining the ambiguity of the agreement, the text of which has not been released . Within the framework of this agreement, Russia therefore does not exclude the development of military-technical cooperation with North Korea. Another agreement provides for the sending of orphans of those killed on the Ukrainian front to the Songdowon colony. The trade, still judged low, increased ninefold in 2023, after Pyongyang began supplying ammunition and ballistic missiles that Russia sends to the Ukrainian front, and for the first five months of the year there was a further increase by 54 percent.
The spokesperson of the National Security Council, John Kirby, does not hide that between the two countries “there may be some form of reciprocity that affects the security of the Korean Peninsula”. Even if “there is nothing concrete yet”. But certainly, the rapprochement between the two countries, one hermit, the second isolated, are developments that Washington “watches very, very closely”.
In the evening, after Putin and Kim laid a wreath at the foot of the Liberation Monument erected in 1946 in honor of the Red Army soldiers who fell in the liberation of the Korean Peninsula from the Japanese occupation forces, a gala concert. Songs performed by the Russian singer Shaman, a great supporter of Putin, including “We will rise” released in 2022 to celebrate those who died in the special operation in Ukraine, like Putin, and Kim in deference, they call the war, assimilated to the fallen in the Great War patriotic.
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