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Russia has much to offer the Korean peace process, from denuclearisation expertise to experience as a mediator
- Russia has been sidelined in the Korean peace process so long that it’s easy to forget its historical role on the peninsula. The Kim-Putin meeting was a reminder of the major role Moscow could again play
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John Barry Kotch lived and worked in Asia for more than a decade as an instructor at LG Academy and visiting professor at Hanyang University’s Graduate School of International Studies in Seoul.
Six years as a recluse consolidating power, often in unsavory ways, while perfecting the country’s weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles along the way, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has since come out of isolation, giving new meaning to the 1960s Beach Boys hit, I Get Around.
In the last 16 months, he has met four times with China’s President Xi Jinping, three times with his South Korean counterpart Moon Jae-in, twice with US President Donald Trump and finally with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, the latter just across the Russian-North Korean border in Vladivostok, in counterpoint to an exhausting 60-hour train ride to Hanoi to meet Trump. Still, having made all the rounds only to a wind up in a familiar place – impasse – defies reason.
Although greeted with scepticism, the Kim-Putin summit should be viewed as a positive – not a negative – development, a potential turning point and one area where Moscow could actually make a major contribution to international peace and security. Neither Russia nor Putin is a stranger to Korean affairs. Putin held multiple summits and negotiated a missile moratorium with Kim Jong-un’s father, Kim Jong-il, in 2000 while the former in its Soviet incarnation furnished the North with its only nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, starting the country on a nuclear trajectory.
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