North Korea will help Russia: Kim tells Putin ally
North Korea will send thousands of military construction workers and sappers to Russia's Kursk region to help rebuild it after a Ukrainian incursion that North Korean troops helped Moscow repel this year, a senior Russian security official said on Tuesday, News.Az reports citing Reuters.
Sergei Shoigu, secretary of Russia's Security Council and a former defence minister with close ties to President Vladimir Putin, spoke after talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang, their second such encounter in just two weeks.
Shoigu said he was carrying out what he said were "special instructions" from Putin.
His visit came at a time when ties between Moscow and Pyongyang - who are drawing closer in the face of what they say is a hostile West - are developing at pace, and days after he said the first direct train since 2020 between Moscow and Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, had set off.
He said he hoped direct flights between Moscow and Pyongyang would also restart for the first time in more than 30 years.
Shoigu's visit was likely to be scrutinised in the West as the United States, South Korea and Ukraine itself have accused North Korea of providing Russia with massive military assistance to keep its war against Ukraine going, something neither Moscow nor Pyongyang has publicly acknowledged.
Shoigu said the talks had lasted more than two hours.
He told a news conference that North Korea would soon start rebuilding Kursk after Moscow - helped by thousands of North Korean troops - expelled Ukrainian forces from there earlier this year after they staged a surprise incursion in August 2024.
"Chairman Kim Jong-un has decided to send one thousand sappers to Russia to demine Russian territory, as well as five thousand military construction workers to rebuild infrastructure facilities destroyed by the occupiers," the Russian state news agency TASS cited Shoigu as saying.
"I think this work will begin in the near future," he added, adding that certain areas would need to be demined first.
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