After a brief stop in Beijing to warm up the meeting that took place on Wednesday between Vladimir Putin y Xi Jinpingthe Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, stood in North Korea in the midst of all the information that suggests that Pyongyang would be sending weapons to the Russian army for its war in Ukraine. Lavrov’s visit also came just a month after the strange trip that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un made to Russia to discuss military cooperation with Putin.
When Lavrov landed in the North Korean capital, Russian television broadcast several videos of the minister greeting a choreographed crowd that cheered him on his arrival. The state news agency TASS published four photographs of Lavrov’s meeting with Kim Jong-un. Several media have indicated that one of the objectives of the trip was prepare a next visit de Putin a Pyongyang.
Before meeting Kim, the Russian minister met with his North Korean counterpart, Choe Son Hui, to whom he thanked North Korea for supporting Moscow in its war against Ukraine. “Moscow deeply values Pyongyang’s unwavering and principled support for the special military operation,” he said.
While the Russian minister was in the North Korean capital, from neighboring South Korea they claimed that the weapons of the Kim regime, in addition to helping Russia in Ukraine, had ended up in Palestine, in the hands of Hamas. North Korea denies that it is arming the Palestinian fundamentalist group.
Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel exposed the group’s “direct and indirect ties” to North Korea, and the weapons used in the offensive “very likely,” a senior South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff official said. They left Pyongyang and passed through intermediaries, including Iran.