Will China help US curb North Korea and Russia's growing military partnership?
Moscow has heaped the praise on Pyongyang for its “principled position” on Ukraine.
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“Until the day of victory we will firmly stand alongside our Russian comrades,” vowed North Korea’s top diplomat, Choe Son Hui, today, as she met with her Russian counterpart in Moscow amid growing evidence of Pyongyang’s troop deployment in Ukraine.
“Historically friendly relations” between Pyongyang and Moscow “are rising to a new level of relations of invincible military comradeship”, claimed Choe, who insisted she had no doubt that the Russian army would prevail in the “sacred struggle to protect the sovereign rights and security interests of their state.”
Russia’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, in turn, heaped the praise on Pyongyang for its “principled position” on Ukraine.
The love-in comes as US Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, claimed today that there are now 10,000 North Korean soldiers in Russia, gearing up to join “Putin’s meat grinder”. The Pentagon estimates that as many as 8,000 North Korean soldiers are positioned in the Kursk region, where Moscow is struggling to fend off a Ukrainian cross-border incursion.
According to Volodymyr Zelensky, North Korean officers and technical personnel have already been spotted in Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine. “I believe they sent officers first to assess the situation before deploying troops,” the Ukrainian president told reporters this week.
Moscow has neither confirmed nor denied the North Korean troop deployment, which marks a serious escalation in the almost three-year-old war.
It is a development that Ukraine’s allies fear, not just because of the boost it provides to Putin’s war machine. Of equal concern is what North Korea might gain in return: It’s thought that Pyongyang is sending troops in a bid to persuade Moscow to share its technology to help boost North Korea’s nuclear scheme.
That Seoul and Washington are both calling on North Korea to withdraw troops from Ukraine is unsurprising. A little more unexpected is the country that Washington is now turning to for help in achieving said aim.
Blinken confirmed today that three top US diplomats met with Chinese diplomats for several hours at the home of China’s Ambassador to the US, Xie Feng, in Washington earlier this week.
During the rare meeting, the US officials urged Beijing to use its sway over Kim Jong Un to curb his country’s growing military alliance with Russia.
Blinken labelled it a “robust conversation”, adding that Chinese officials know Washington’s expectations that “they’ll use the influence that they have to work to curb these activities”.
Why would Beijing pay attention to such a request?
Certainly, it wouldn’t be out of concern for Ukraine. Yet the US may have rightly recognised that China has some of reasons of its own to feel unease over the strengthening bond between Moscow and Pyongyang.
For starters, China is a friend of both North and South Korea. So a strengthened Russia-North Korea partnership, which in turn heightens tensions between Pyongyang and Seoul, runs contrary to Beijing’s goal for a peaceful Korean Peninsula.
Xi may also feel threatened by Kim’s blossoming friendship with Putin because it reduces the extent to which he is dependent on China to prop up his country’s isolated economy.
China is North Korea’s biggest trade partner and arguably the nation with the most leverage over Kim’s regime. Beijing may well not want to have to share influence over Pyongyang with Moscow.
What’s more, the further North Korea drifts towards Russia, the more a threatened South Korea will lean on Washington for support. China doesn’t want this either.
There are several logical reasons to suspect Beijing may dislike news of the North Korean troop deployment. And US officials aren’t going to miss the chance to at least attempt to exploit them.
Yet there is no guarantee that Xi will put any real pressure on Kim to stop sending troops.
At the moment, there’s been radio silence from China on the matter.
When asked this week about the aforementioned meeting at Ambassador Xie’s house, Lin Jian, a spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry, simply replied that Beijing had “no information to provide”.
Caitlin Allen
Deputy Editor
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