After months of , it’s now clear. He won’t. Kim Jong Un will not be traveling to Moscow on Saturday for Russia’s Victory Day celebrations marking the end of World War II in Europe.
Having previously said the North Korean leader would attend, the Kremlin last week, saying Kim had “internal matters” at home to deal with. Pyongyang said Monday that Kim Yong Nam, who as president of the Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly is North Korea’s official head of state, would go instead.
The decision has sparked rumors about Kim Jong Un’s motives, from domestic political turmoil to discontent at the prospect of not being the center of attention at the gathering, where about two dozen world leaders are expected.
Kim, who succeeded his father at the end of 2011, has yet to make a foreign trip as leader, and now that the official three-year period of mourning is up, the odds had looked good that Moscow would be his first stop.
The move would have served as a reminder of Kim’s grandfather, the “eternal president,” Kim Il Sung, whose first foreign trip was to Moscow during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was North Korea’s political and economic benefactor. But it would also have avoided the potential problems of a trip to Beijing, where President Xi Jinping has made his displeasure with the young leader well known, and it could have advanced North Korea’s efforts to lessen its dependence on China.
Relations between North Korea and Russia had been . Pyongyang designated 2015 “the year of friendship with Russia,” and the media has been awash with reports of large delegations traveling in both directions and signing deals at every turn.
There have been reports of Russian companies gaining access to North Korea’s mineral deposits in return for improving its energy sector, of Russia building a natural gas pipeline to North Korea, of a new road between the two countries and . A recent aims to boost annual bilateral trade to $1 billion by 2020.
But such deals are largely symbolic, analysts say. “There’s been an abundance of talk but no walk,” said Andrei Lankov, a Russian scholar of Korea who teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul.
Facing economic stagnation, Russia has little desire to invest in projects that will not be profitable, and it is tough to make money in North Korea. Chinese businessmen complain about the unpredictability of dealing with their counterparts in Pyongyang, and Orascom, an Egyptian company that built North Korea’s mobile network, has reportedly been unable to repatriate its profits.
“Russia might be giving North Korea political and diplomatic support, but Russian state companies and private investors won’t do much if they can’t make money,” Lankov said.
Georgy Kunadze, a former Russian deputy foreign minister in charge of his country’s relations with Asian nations, agreed. “This is atmospherics. It’s not substantive,” Kunadze said. “The problem has always been that North Korea has very little to offer Russia, either in economic or financial advantages or in political influence.”
The only Russian operation that seems to be working is a rail project connecting Khasan, in Russia, with Rajin, a North Korean port — and Rajin is a transit point for the export of Russian coal to South Korea rather than for Russian business with the North.
Russia, indeed, has little need of North Korea’s main exports, minerals and seafood. It has plenty of the former and doesn’t consume much of the latter.
In the international sphere, meanwhile, Pyongyang’s words of support on Ukraine carry little, if any, weight.
That is not to say that Moscow — which has accelerated its strategy of “looking east” since its annexation of Crimea triggered Western sanctions — has no interest in closer ties with Pyongyang.
“This is an opportunity to promote its positive role in the Asia-Pacific and give added value to the Russian pivot,” Dmitry Suslov of Russia’s National Research University said at a recent conference in Seoul.
Still, trade statistics show the real picture: China’s trade with North Korea, worth $6.5 billion annually, is about 60 times Russia’s trade with the isolated state. Ninety percent of the North’s exports go to China. , but only to $113 million in 2013, the latest year for which Russian statistics are available.
For North Korea, that means there is no substitute for China, despite the current political tensions. “It’s still overwhelmingly dependent on China, and it’s highly doubtful that an increase in Russian-North Korean trade can make a dent in that,” said Scott Snyder, a Korea expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Only China has the strategic considerations — the need to keep North Korea from collapsing and sending millions of refugees, and possibly nuclear material, into its territory — to force it to keep propping up Pyongyang.
That means speculation will now turn to another date: Sept. 3, when China marks its own World War II victory day. Will Kim attend that parade?
Snyder said it’s possible. “We’re at the stage where we should be prepared to be surprised,” he said.
Birnbaum reported from Moscow.
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