Putin beams as he’s greeted by Kim Jong-Un in North Korea

Vladimir Putin beamed as he was greeted by Kim Jong-Un after touching town in North Korea after praising the dictator’s support of his invasion of Ukraine.

Jong-Un rolled out the red carpet for the Russian leader with a welcome ceremony at an airport in Pyongyang. The two men were pictured shaking hands and hugging each other on the runway before leaving the airport in the same car.

Newsreel footage showed Putin on Tuesday leaving for his first trip to the isolated nation in 24 years, with a confrontation between North and South Korean troops on their shared border highlighting regional security tensions. 

Huge banners with a smiling photograph of the Russian leader reading ‘we ardently welcome President Putin!’ were hung from lamp-posts across Pyongyang alongside Russian flags, images in Russian state media showed.

The trip is Putin’s first to the isolated nation in 24 years, with a recent confrontation between North and South Korean troops on the countries’ shared border highlighting regional security tensions. 

Moscow and Pyongyang have been allies since North Korea‘s founding after World War II and have drawn even closer since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 led to the West isolating Putin internationally.

The United States and its allies have accused North Korea of supplying Russia with much-needed arms, including ballistic missiles to use in Ukraine, which mocked the growing relationship between the two nations. 

The North has denied giving Russia military hardware but, ahead of his trip, Putin thanked Kim Jong Un‘s government for helping the war effort.

‘We highly appreciate that the DPRK (North Korea) is firmly supporting the special military operations of Russia being conducted in Ukraine,’ Putin wrote in an article published by Pyongyang’s state media on Tuesday.

Russia and the North are ‘now actively developing the many-sided partnership’, Putin wrote.     

Both countries are under rafts of UN sanctions – Pyongyang since 2006 over banned nuclear and ballistic missile programmes and Moscow over the invasion of Ukraine.

Putin praised North Korea for ‘defending their interests very effectively despite the US economic pressure, provocation, blackmail and military threats that have lasted for decades’.

He also hailed Moscow and Pyongyang for ‘maintaining the common line and stand at the UN’.

North Korea said the visit showed bilateral ties ‘are getting stronger day by day’, the official Korean Central News Agency reported, and would ‘give fresh vitality to the development of the good-neighbourly cooperative relations between the two countries’.  

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba urged the international community to counter ‘the lonely bromance’ between Putin and Kim by increasing arms supplies to Kyiv.

‘The best way to respond to it is to continue strengthening the diplomatic coalition for just and lasting peace in Ukraine and delivering more Patriots and ammunition to Ukraine,’ Kuleba told AFP.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Putin’s trip showed how he was ‘dependent’ on authoritarian leaders.

‘Their closest friends and the biggest supporters of the Russian war effort – war of aggression – (are) North Korea, Iran and China,’ Stoltenberg said. 

North Korea is eager for high-end military technology to advance its nuclear, missile, satellite and nuclear-powered submarine programmes, according to experts.

Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said the two leaders would possibly sign a ‘comprehensive strategic partnership treaty’ to outline cooperation on ‘security issues’, state-run Russian news agencies reported.

North Korea could promise ‘to provide Russia with continuing supplies of artillery, guided rockets for multiple rocket launchers, and short-range missiles to support Russia’s operations in Ukraine’, Bruce Bennett, senior defence analyst at RAND Corporation, told Yonhap.

In return, it will want ‘Russia to provide a variety of advanced technologies’, he said, plus ‘a substantial flow of Russian oil and food products along with hard currency payments’.

Despite this, North Korea has described allegations of supplying weapons to Russia as ‘absurd’.

However, it did thank Russia for using its UN veto in March to effectively end monitoring of sanctions violations just as UN experts were starting to probe alleged arms transfers.

The United States voiced ‘concern’ on Monday about the trip because of the security implications for South Korea as well as Ukraine.

The two Koreas have remained technically at war since their 1950-53 conflict and the border dividing them is one of the most heavily fortified in the world.

‘We know North Korean ballistic missiles are still being used to hit Ukrainian targets (and) there could be some reciprocity here that could affect security on the Korean peninsula,’ National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters.

Highlighting those security concerns, South Korea said its troops fired at soldiers from the North who briefly crossed the border on Tuesday then retreated.

The South’s military said it believed the North Korean soldiers accidentally crossed as they were fortifying the border, but said some of them were wounded after detonating landmines.

It comes as an overnight drone attack set several oil storage tanks ablaze near the town of Azov in southern Russia on Tuesday, sparking a large fire, local officials said.

Ukraine did not immediately claim responsibility but it has carried out similar attacks on Russian energy facilities before, arguing they are fair targets given that they fuel Moscow’s military.

‘Oil product tanks caught fire in Azov as a result of a drone attack. According to preliminary data, there were no casualties,’ the governor of the local Rostov region, Vasily Golubev, said on Telegram.

Video published by the emergencies ministry showed thick smoke and flames billowing out of what appeared to be multiple oil storage tanks in an undisclosed location.

Officials did not say how many drones were involved in the attack.

Some 200 firefighters and emergency personnel were deployed to deal with the blaze, which spanned an area of at least 3,200 square metres (3,800 square yards), the emergencies ministry said.

The Rostov region sits directly across the border from Ukrainian and is home to the operational headquarters overseeing Russia’s invasion.

On the battlefield, Ukraine said that Russian forces were fighting to enter the outskirts of Chasiv Yar, a flashpoint town of the war in the east whose capture could accelerate Russian advances.

Ukraine’s eastern region of Donetsk, where war-scarred Chasiv Yar lies, has borne the brunt of fighting over more than two years and the Kremlin claims the region is part of Russia.

‘The enemy keeps trying to advance to the microdistrict Novy in the town of Chasiv Yar,’ Ukraine’s military said in a briefing, adding that fighting was ‘currently taking place’.

Further south, it said Moscow’s forces were also pushing towards Pokrovsk, where they were closing in on a key road that would complicate supplies between strategic hubs in the region. 

Ukraine’s air force meanwhile said it had downed 10 Iranian-designed attack drones launched by Russian forces overnight.

South Korea this morning revealed Multiple North Korean soldiers have been killed or injured in a landmine explosion inside the Demilitarized Zone as South Korea fired warning shots. 

The South Korean military said it fired the shots to repel North Korean soldiers  who temporarily crossed the rivals’ land border for the second time this month.

They said an estimated 20 to 30 North Korean soldiers, while engaging in unspecified construction work on the northern side of the border, crossed the military demarcation line that bisects the countries at around 8.30am local time.

The North Korean soldiers then retreated after the South broadcasted warnings and fired shots, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said, adding that they did not see any suspicious activity after. 

As they fled, an unspecified number of North Korean soldiers were injured in a landmine explosion, the Yonhap News Agency reports, according to the AFP.

‘North Korean military suffers multiple casualties due to a mine explosion during work,’ the report said, without giving further details.

The Joint Chiefs said they don’t believe the North Korean soldiers intruded the border intentionally and that the North did not return fire.

They noted that the North has been increasing construction activity in frontline border areas, such as installing suspected anti-tank barriers, reinforcing roads and planting land mines.