Shifts in East Asian Dynamics
Shifts in East Asian Dynamics
North Korea sent more than 3m artillery shells to Russia, South Korea forming diplomatic ties with Cuba, Potential meeting between the Kim Jong Un and Kishida
UPDATES: North Korea has sent 6,700 shipping containers of ammunition to Russia in recent months, potentially providing over 3 million 152-millimeter artillery shells, South Korea's defense chief says.
The talks between Seoul and Havana were held in strict secrecy, known only to South Korea's foreign ministry and a few officials at United Nations headquarters in New York, where the agreement was concluded Feb. 14. The two sides carefully managed the news, agreeing to announce it five minutes after the 8 a.m. exchange of diplomatic notes there.
On February 15, Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, showed positive signals regarding a summit meeting between Kim Jong Un and Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio.
Taken form the Asia Society
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin meet at the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia's Far East in September. (KCNA via Reuters) (Taken form Nikkei Asia)
North Korea sent more than 3m artillery shells to Russia, says Seoul
By JUNNOSUKE KOBARA, Nikkei staff writer
North Korea has sent 6,700 shipping containers of ammunition to Russia in recent months, potentially providing over 3 million 152-millimeter artillery shells, South Korea's defense chief says.
Russia is expected to continue to provide technological assistance for North Korea's military surveillance satellite program, Defense Minister Shin Won-sik told South Korean media on Monday. Pyongyang is seen launching another satellite as soon as late March, Shin said.
South Korea's National Intelligence Service had estimated in November that the North transferred more than 1 million artillery rounds to Moscow.
Russia has been using 10,000 artillery shells per day in its war against Ukraine, The Wall Street Journal reported in January, citing data from the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank. This is five times the volume currently used by Ukraine.
Moscow has resolved its shortage of artillery shells from last summer, when Ukraine was using 7,000 rounds per day versus Russia's 5,000.
The International Institute for Strategic Studies, another British think tank, also thinks North Korean artillery shells are propping up Russia's war efforts.
Since North Korean leader Kim Jong Un met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in September, Pyongyang has supplied Moscow with at least a month's worth of shells, according to IISS.
Shin said North Korea's munitions factories are running at roughly 30% capacity due to electricity shortages. But factories supplying artillery shells to Russia are operating at full capacity, suggesting that Kim's regime is prioritizing munitions supplies to Moscow.
Russia has sent 30% more containers to North Korea than it has received from the North, Shin said. The North Korea-bound containers were likely mainly filled with food, he said.
Analysts previously said North Korea had been suffering from food insecurity since the coronavirus pandemic. Now it is believed that North Korea is maintaining stable food supplies, Shin said.
Read here
South Korea flips script on North by winning over Cuba
By HIROSHI MINEGISHI, Nikkei senior staff writer
Before major elections in South Korea, the Korean Peninsula is often buffeted by what has been dubbed a "North Wind" -- a military provocation or another move by North Korea that shakes up the bilateral relationship and sways the vote.
But the April 10 general election, coming amid heightened tensions between the two neighbors, has been preceded by a "South Wind" -- the surprising news last week of South Korea forming diplomatic ties with Cuba.
"It seems that Cuba, hungry for economic cooperation and cultural exchanges with us, wanted to establish diplomatic relations with us without informing the North," said a senior South Korean official quoted in media here, conveying the South's sense of triumph.
The talks between Seoul and Havana were held in strict secrecy, known only to South Korea's foreign ministry and a few officials at United Nations headquarters in New York, where the agreement was concluded Feb. 14. The two sides carefully managed the news, agreeing to announce it five minutes after the 8 a.m. exchange of diplomatic notes there.
This was a diplomatic coup for South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol's administration. North Korea had touted its close ties with its "brother" Cuba, the only socialist nation in Latin America.
Cuba has some history with South Korea. The 1988 Seoul Olympics, on which the South had pinned its post-divide national pride, drew athletes from almost the entire world, with the U.S. and the Soviet Union competing together for the first time in 12 years. Cuba was one of the few countries to sit it out, alongside North Korea, which had called for a boycott, while even China and Iran participated.
Even when the Communist bloc collapsed with the end of the Cold War the following year, and many of its members switched sides to South Korea, Cuba kept itself aligned with the North.
Although Pyongyang lacks strong trade or security ties with Havana, it felt a sense of solidarity with the island through three generations of shared struggle as socialist anti-American countries.
As president of Cuba, Fidel Castro forged a close relationship with Kim Il Sung, North Korea's first leader, and met with him and son Kim Jong Il on a trip there in 1986. Cuba's current president, Miguel Diaz-Canel, met with North Korean counterpart Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang in 2018 and received a New Year's card from him for 2024.
The increased closeness between Cuba and South Korea is a more recent trend.
Cuba hopes that relations with South Korea will bring an economic boost. © Reuters
The Cuban government, struggling with shortages amid U.S. sanctions, hopes that relations with Seoul will provide an economic boost. South Korean movies, drama and K-pop have won the hearts of young Cubans. On the South Korean side, hopes are reportedly high in the travel industry for traffic between the two countries.
Syria is now the only U.N. member state to have diplomatic relations with North Korea but not South Korea, according to the South's Yonhap News Agency.
Times have changed a great deal.
In the 1970s, when then-U.S. President Richard Nixon -- amid Washington's rapprochement with China -- encouraged the North and South to join the U.N. at the same time, Pyongyang was firmly opposed. North Korea was stronger militarily and economically than its southern neighbor, and it worried that the proposal would cement them as "two Koreas," hindering future unification.
They were admitted simultaneously in 1991. The intervening two decades had brought drastic change -- the North-South power balance flipped, with South Korea taking a widening lead, and the Soviet Union, previously a patron of Pyongyang, established relations with the South in 1990. North Korea agreed to join the U.N. with South Korea while still maintaining that they were not separate countries.
The "South Wind" of Seoul's ties with Havana has undoubtedly caused an uproar in North Korea. As of Thursday, more than a week later, it had yet to be mentioned in North Korean media, seemingly confirming that Pyongyang was caught off guard.
North Korea's leadership "must be shocked and furious," said a North Korean source familiar with the situation in Pyongyang.
Kim Jong Un -- a grandson of Kim Il Sung -- has adopted the "two Koreas" view and abandoned the idea of unification, underscoring Pyongyang's plight after swimming against the international tide for so long.
The North has been closing diplomatic missions around the world, including in Uganda, Angola, Spain and Hong Kong. The pullback is believed to owe to Pyongyang's difficulty earning foreign currency under sanctions, which has left it unable to afford to maintain these facilities.
The move by its "brother" Cuba to establish ties with South Korea, coming on top of this diplomatic redistribution of resources, may push North Korea closer to larger powers China and Russia.
This has been much discussed in South Korean media. The JoongAng Daily said the relationship between Havana and Seoul would deal a political and psychological blow to the North, while Yonhap linked it to South Korea's efforts to "expand its diplomatic horizons."
This South Wind is likely to benefit the conservative ruling People Power Party, which faces a tough contest in the April election against the progressive Democratic Party, the largest opposition party, which favors reconciliation with the North.
The political wind from the North remains concerning. There is speculation that Pyongyang will engage in a major military provocation just before the election.
Because every North Wind incident reminds South Korean voters of national security implications, it has been traditionally believed that those events favor conservative politicians ahead of the election. Even now, this appears to be the consensus among commentators.
But starting from around 2010, the year of North Korea's deadly shelling of South Korea's Yeonpyeong Island, more voices in the South have called for dialogue with the North out of fear of an all-out military clash between the two Koreas. Now some observers believe that such a political environment would favor progressives and their message of peace.
The leadership in Pyongyang has not given up on the idea that fomenting a national security crisis in South Korea would tilt young people toward peace rather than toward a hard-line stance, according to a scholar closely familiar with the North Korean regime. Yoon had pledged to retaliate against North Korea "multiple times as hard" if provoked.
Read here
Will Kim Jong Un Meet With Japan’s Prime Minister Kishida?
By Mitch Shin
On February 15, Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, showed positive signals regarding a summit meeting between Kim Jong Un and Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio.
“I think there would be no reason not to appreciate his recent speech as a positive one, if it was prompted by his real intention to boldly free himself from the past fetters,” the North’s state-controlled KCNA quoted Kim Yo Jong as saying.
She was reacting to Kishida’s remarks that he felt a strong need to change the relationship between the countries. The Japanese prime minister also said he is willing to meet Kim Jong Un with no preconditions – similar to offers made by Washington toward Pyongyang.
Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Hayashi Yoshimasa said Japan was “paying attention” to the comments from Kim.
Japanese media have reported that Kishida might seek to visit Pyongyang as early as this summer. However, whether a summit meeting between Kim and Kishida will occur is questionable.
In her statement published in KCNA, Kim Yo Jong was clear that Pyongyang would be open to dialogue with Tokyo assuming that Japan agrees to drop the biggest issue between the two countries: the abduction issue.
In the first North Korea-Japan summit in 2002, Kim Jong Il, the father of Kim Jong Un, firmly recognized and apologized for North Korea’s abduction of Japanese citizens. North Korea admitted to abducting 13 people; five of them returned to Japan in October 2002. According to Pyongyang, the rest of them are dead.
The Japanese government, however, said it has identified 17 Japanese citizens as victims of abductions. It also claims that there have been no thorough investigations to find out whether the remaining abductees in North Korea are alive or dead. In this context, Tokyo has consistently demanded that Pyongyang accept every necessary measure regarding investigations of the abductees living in the North or were dead.
From Pyongyang’s perspective, the issue has been settled and no abductees remain to return to Japan. Japan continues to push for more efforts from North Korea at every opportunity.
Official-level dialogues have been conducted between the two countries in the past decades to resolve the conflicts, with no breakthroughs.
Hayashi, who is also Japan’s minister in charge of the abduction issue, said Kim Yo Jong’s demand that Tokyo must drop the abduction issue was “totally unacceptable.”
After South Korea established diplomatic relations with Cuba, one of the North’s closest friends, North Korea appeared to have attempted to initiate diplomacy with Japan in a bid to show the international community that it could also work with the U.S. allies in the region. However, as Tokyo has reiterated that there will be no normalization of relations between Japan and North Korea unless the abduction issue is resolved, Pyongyang may not be willing to hold a summit meeting given the circumstances.
North Korea’s continuous efforts to beef up its nuclear capability are perceived as a security threat by Japan. Along with Kishida’s vow to strengthen his country’s military capabilities, as narrated in the national security documents, Tokyo has sought to tackle the North’s missile threats and nuclear development. However, Japan’s leverage over Pyongyang’s nuclear development is limited, as the main actors are the United States and South Korea. According to Pyongyang’s official statements following its missile launches, its missile development is aimed at deterrence of the South Korea-U.S. alliance’s preemptive strikes against it while confronting the growing leverage of the United States in the region.
In the unexpected openness to North Korea diplomacy, Kishida might be seeking to improve his low approval ratings (which recently hit a record low of 14 percent). As it stands, Kishida would face an uphill battle in his bid for re-election as president of the Liberal Democracy Party, as other contenders – including Ishiba Shigeru, Motegi Toshimitsu, and Kono Taro – are outpolling him. Kishida seems to be holding his diplomatic achievements can tip the balance; he will have his first state visit to the United States in April and now may be eyeing a meeting with Kim Jong Un.
Pyongyang’s rare openness to Tokyo’s request for dialogue brought attention from Washington and Seoul. North Korea has not responded to their attempts to renew the stalled nuclear and inter-Korean talks for the past four years. Given Kim Jong Un’s focus on strengthening ties with Russia so as to create a space to evade the economic sanctions imposed by the United States and the United Nations, however, experts are skeptical about the possibility of Kishida and Kim holding a summit in Pyongyang this summer.
Read here