For twenty-four years, no Russian president set foot on North Korean soil. For twenty-four years, Russia had only one leader. So it was his own Vladimir Putin who, after two decades, decided to revisit its secretive neighbor at the end of June, just a few days after the G7 meeting, in its effort to cement an alternative world order to the one that emerged after the Second World War.
Putin and Kim Jong-un They shared a limousine and praise, and signed, together, a mutual security agreement.
“Russia is currently engaged in a just fight against hegemonic forces to defend its sovereign rights, security and interests,” the North Korean said. “I take this opportunity to affirm that we will always be with Russia on the anti-imperialist front and on the independence front.” This has been the case since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. While the European Union collected, in early March, a third of a million shells for the resistance, North Korea was able to send one and a half million shells to the invaders.
“We must see what is happening [en Oriente Próximo y en Europa central] as a unique conflict, which is global, within a Second Cold War, potentially a Third World War, where there is an axis that unites China, Russia, Iran and North Korea,” explained the historian Niall Ferguson in this newspaper. “Despite their many differences, they share the goal of undermining American primacy, what we Americans call the international liberal order. Their way of achieving this is open different and simultaneous challenges to the United States and its allies, causing a kind of overexertion.
The fluidity of North Korean shipments to the front has not suffered in recent months. Kim, who returned the visit with a rail trip to Russia in September, has contributed to Putin’s war effort, as has Iran, with short-range missiles aimed at destroying the country’s cities and strategic infrastructure. Now, they warn from South Korea, the plan goes a little further. Last week the first reports of dead and wounded North Korean fighters on the Donetsk front in eastern Ukraine emerged.
Yesterday, the South Korean Defense Minister, Kim Yong-hyunassumed this news as true and as “very likely” that the Pyongyang regime would deploy more men in Europe to gain combat experience. This newspaper has confirmed with Ukrainian sources that they have the same certainties.
Las nuevas revelaciones sobre el respaldo iraní y norcoreano a los planes de Putin para Ucrania contrastan con las últimas limitaciones autoimpuestas por Estados Unidos y la Unión Europea a su aliado. La Administración Biden bloqueó el uso de sus misiles de largo alcance para atacar las posiciones dentro de Rusia que las tropas de Putin usan para disparar contra Ucrania. Francia y Reino Unido, disuadidos por la Casa Blanca, hicieron lo mismo. Mark Rutte, por su parte, debutó como secretario general de la OTAN con un viaje a Kiev, y allí dijo que “Ucrania seguirá por este camino hasta que se convierta en miembro de nuestra Alianza”.
El presidente Zelenski, sin embargo, insistió en la necesidad de priorizar la defensa de sus cielos, sacando el ejemplo de Israel como agravio comparativo. “Vemos cómo en Oriente Próximo es posible proteger la vida de las personas gracias a la unidad de los aliados”, reivindicó. “El derribo conjunto de misiles iraníes no es diferente del derribo de misiles rusos, y ambos regímenes van de la mano”.
Los ucranianos ven, con estos ojos, más cerca su gélido invierno. A una capacidad de producción energética bajo mínimos —más de la mitad de las plantas están afectadas por los bombardeos—, a la subida inminente de los impuestos para costear la guerra, se unen las dudas sobre la implicación del próximo presidente de Estados Unidos en la defensa de su soberanía, el enfriamiento del apoyo de potencias como Alemania y las dificultades para reclutar más soldados dentro del país.
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