What Russia’s Pact With North Korea Means

A Friendship That’s Putting The World On Edge

Military and defense expert Michael Muir examines the implications of the recent North Korea-Russia security pact. He explores the historical context of their relationship and the potential consequences of their alliance, particularly in the context of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

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Transcript:

Let’s stick with sanctioned countries here real quick and talk about North Korea, South Korea.

I’m curious. So North Korea just had a pact with Russia and you alluded to earlier that there’s been allegations that North Korea shipped arms to Russia.

What does this North Korea-Russia pact look like?

What does it mean?

Sure. It’s actually very, very similar to a security pact the Soviet Union and North Korea had.

That was signed in 1961, and the language is remarkably similar in this pact.

Again, there’s a pretty long history between North Korea and Russia.

It goes back to the tail end of World War II, the Korean War.

We don’t need to really get into the specifics, but North Korea’s foreign policy for a long time was to play off Russia and China as two communist states against one another.

Then when the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia sort of distanced itself from North Korea.

Yeltsin didn’t really have too much interest in maintaining ties with Pyongyang and preferring South Korea.

But then when Putin came into power, then that began to change, and again, when you are without a lot of friends on the world stage, you’ll take what you can get.

But yeah, what North Korea has to offer Russia is artillery shells, and a lot of them.

Its arms industry is quite closely aligned to the Soviet Union, so it’s quite well—it was quite close to the Soviet Union, so the munitions that North Korea are building are, you know, compatible with Russian artillery.

So this pact, by the wording, again, as I said, the language is very similar to the 1961 pact, and it states that if one or the other is attacked, the other will come to their aid with everything at their disposal.

So the language of that is really interesting. I don’t think it’s going to change very much in the short or even medium term.

But it really depends on how those words are interpreted.

So what potentially could happen, and I’m not saying it will, but let’s say Ukraine launches a counteroffensive into Crimea, which Russia claims is its own.

Does that count as an attack on Russian territory?

And would that require North Korean intervention?

Possibly.

Similarly, and this is something that European countries have been trying to avoid, is if there’s a strike on Russian territory using Western hardware, does that count?

Possibly.