NORTH KOREAN LEADER KIM JONG UN CONCLUDES RUSSIA VISIT

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is on his way home Sunday from Russia, ending a six-day trip that triggered global concerns about weapons transfer deals between the two countries locked in separate standoffs with the West. Kim’s armoured train departed to the sound of the Russian patriotic march song “Farewell of Slavianka” at the end of a farewell ceremony at a railway station in Artyom, a far eastern Russian city about 200 kilometres (124 miles) from the border with North Korea, Russia’s state news agency RIA reported.
Senior officials including Russia’s Minister of Natural Resources Alexander Kozlov and Primorye regional Gov. Oleg Kozhemyako were present at the ceremony, which featured a Russian military band playing both North Korean and Russian national anthems.
Since entering Russia last Tuesday in his first overseas trip in more than four years, Kim had met President Vladimir Putin and visited key military and technology sites, underscoring the countries’ deepening defence cooperation in the face of separate, intensifying confrontations with the West.
US and South Korean officials have said North Korea could provide badly needed munitions for Moscow’s war on Ukraine in exchange for sophisticated Russian weapons technology that would advance Kim’s nuclear ambitions. UN Security Council resolutions — which Russia, a permanent member, previously endorsed — ban North Korea from exporting or importing any arms.
Observers say Russia’s alleged attempts to receive ammunitions and artillery shells from North Korea suggest Moscow’s desperation to refill its arsenal exhausted in the war with Ukraine.
“Military cooperation between North Korea and Russia is illegal and unjust as it contravenes UN Security Council resolutions and various other international sanctions,” South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol said in written responses Sunday to questions from The Associated Press. “The international community will unite more tightly in response to such a move.”
In return for supplying conventional arms to Russia, experts say North Korea would seek Russian economic and food aid but also transfers of technologies to build powerful missiles, a nuclear-propelled submarine and a spy satellite.
North Korea has publicly sought to introduce such high-tech weapons systems citing what it called intensifying US-led hostilities. Earlier Sunday, Kim was in a lighter mode, touring a university and watching a walrus show at a Russian aquarium.
Russia’s state media released videos of Kim, accompanied by his top officials, talking with Russian officials through translators at the campus of the Far Eastern Federal University in Russky Island. At the island’s Primorsky Aquarium, Russia’s largest, Kim watched performances featuring beluga whales, bottlenose dolphins, fur seals and “Misha” the walrus, which he seemed to particularly enjoy, according to Russian media.