Key events
South Korea identifies 10,000 shipping containers containing suspected artillery ammunition
Andrew Roth
Andrew Roth is the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent
South Korean defence minister Shin Wonsik said in an interview with Bloomberg News that Seoul had identified at least 10,000 shipping containers suspected to be containing artillery ammunition and other weapons sent from North Korea to Russia.
Those containers could contain as much as 4.8m shells, Shin said. EU countries have struggled to meet the goal of supplying 1m artillery shells to Ukraine over the past year, sending just half of that amount.
“Putin is expected to seek closer security cooperation with North Korea, especially military supplies such as artillery shells that are necessary to seize a chance to win,” Shin told Bloomberg News.
Vladimir Putin made a stop-off in Russia’s far east on Tuesday en route to a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang, Russian state media reported.
Putin’s trip to the diamond-producing Republic of Sakha, Russia’s largest region by area, was his first visit there since 2014, Tass news agency said.
He was due to hold a series of meetings, including with the regional leader, before flying to North Korea later on Tuesday for talks likely to include the signing of a partnership agreement with the isolated country.
It is unclear what time exactly the Russian leader will be arriving in Pyongyang today. It is expected to be in the evening, local time. Tomorrow will be the key day of his state visit, when there will be an official ceremony and Putin will reportedly receive a guard of honour.
The last time Putin visited North Korea on a presidential trip was in 2000, when he met Kim’s late father, Kim Jong-il.
Nato’s outgoing secretary general has called for China to face consequences if it keeps up support to Russia as he trumpeted a sharp increase in allies’ defence spending since the invasion of Ukraine.
Jens Stoltenberg said that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit this week to North Korea, which has supplied shells to Moscow despite being under UN sanctions, further showed how Moscow was “dependent” on authoritarian leaders.
Stoltenberg said that Kyiv needed predictable and steady military funding as he hailed the uptick in Nato member defence budgets – addressing a key factor behind Donald Trump’s skepticism about helping Ukraine.
Nato next month celebrates its 75th anniversary with a summit in Washington that aims to send a decisive long-term message of support for Ukraine ahead of President Joe Biden’s reelection fight against Republican candidate Trump in November.
“The more credible our long-term support, the quicker Moscow will realize it cannot wait us out,” Stoltenberg, a former Norwegian prime minister, said on a visit to the US capital to lay the groundwork.
“It may seem like a paradox, but the path to peace is more weapons for Ukraine,” he said.
In 2023, Stoltenberg was asked to extend his tenure as Nato’s secretary general for a further year until October 2024 after members of the western military alliance failed to agree on a replacement.
It was reported earlier today that Hungary had dropped its opposition to Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte as the next Nato secretary-general. Slovakia is also prepared to support Rutte as the next Nato chief, Slovak President Peter Pellegrini said on Tuesday.
Putin plans to build architecture of ‘indivisible security in Eurasia’
Here are some quotes from Vladimir Putin’s letter published by North Korean state media ahead of his planned visit to North Korea later today. He wrote:
We will develop alternative mechanisms of trade and mutual settlements that are not controlled by the west, and jointly resist illegitimate unilateral restrictions.
And at the same time – we will build an architecture of equal and indivisible security in Eurasia.
The Russian president also vowed support for Pyongyang’s efforts to defend its interests despite what he called “US pressure, blackmail and military threats”. The letter was printed in North Korea’s Rodong Sinmun, the ruling Workers’ Party mouthpiece.
North Korean state media also published articles praising Russia and supporting Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which was launched in February 2022.
“The Korean people will always be on the side of the Russian government and people, extending full support and solidarity to their struggle to defend the national sovereignty and security interests,” the Korean Central news agency (KCNA) said in a commentary.
US state department spokesperson Matthew Miller repeated charges on Monday that North Korea had supplied “dozens of ballistic missiles and over 11,000 containers of munitions to Russia” for use in Ukraine.
He said the US had seen Putin “get incredibly desperate over the past few months” and look to Iran and North Korea to make up for equipment lost on the battlefield. Moscow and Pyongyang have denied arms transfers.
White House ‘concerned’ about ‘deepening relationship’ between Russia and North Korea
Andrew Roth
Andrew Roth is the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent
The White House said on Monday that Washington is apprehensive over closer ties between Russia and North Korea.
“We’re not concerned about the trip [by Putin],” national security council spokesperson, John Kirby, told reporters Monday. “What we are concerned about is the deepening relationship between these two countries.”
Kirby said the worry was not just that “North Korean ballistic missiles are still being used to hit Ukrainian targets, but because there could be some reciprocity here that could affect security on the Korean peninsula”.
Opening summary
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the war in Ukraine. The time has just gone past 10:30am in Kyiv.
Vladimir Putin has praised North Korea for “firmly supporting” Moscow’s war in Ukraine, in an article written for Korea’s Central news agency (KCNA) ahead of a rare diplomatic visit to Pyongyang on Tuesday.
“We highly appreciate that the DPRK (North Korea) is firmly supporting the special military operations of Russia being conducted in Ukraine,” the Russian president wrote.
The two countries are “now actively developing the many-sided partnership,” Putin wrote, pointing to, for example, the fact that Moscow and Kim Jong-un’s regime have been “maintaining the common line and stand at the UN”.
The trip “will put bilateral cooperation on to a higher level with our joint efforts and this will contribute to developing reciprocal and equal cooperation between Russia and the DPRK,” the Russian leader wrote, according to KCNA.
Putin is expected to arrive in North Korea this evening (local time) for his first visit to the isolated country in 24 years and will stay for about a day before departing to Vietnam.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un extended an invitation to Putin during a visit to Russia’s far east last September.
North Korea has supplied Russia with millions of rounds of Soviet-era artillery munitions as a crucial lifeline to prop up the Russian military campaign in Ukraine. The US secretary of defence, Lloyd Austin, last month told lawmakers that the supplies of munitions and missiles, as well as Iranian drones, had helped the Russian military “get back up on their feet”.
North Korea has also provided Russia with ballistic missiles and electronic equipment used in the war effort. In return, Russia is believed to have provided aid to North Korea’s satellite programme, as well as other arms, economic aid and diplomatic support (you can read more on the story here).
We’ll bring you the latest on Putin’s visit as it happens. In other developments:
-
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. “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, wrote on Telegram.
-
Hungary has dropped its opposition to Mark Rutte as the next Nato secretary-general, Dutch media reported on Tuesday, after the outgoing Dutch prime minister and his Hungarian counterpart met on the sidelines of a EU leaders meeting in Brussels. Citing sources, Dutch outlets NOS and RTL reported that Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán did not reiterate his demand for an apology from Rutte for what Orban described last month as “problematic” opinions on Hungary. The apology had been one of the two conditions Hungary had put forward for approving Rutte as the successor to Jens Stoltenberg at the helm of Nato. The other – the guarantee that Hungary would not have to provide funding for Ukraine or send personnel to the war-torn country – was met last week by Stoltenberg, Reuters reported.
-
A Russian occupation official said on Monday that fighting was gripping parts of Ukraine’s north-eastern Kharkiv region, with Ukraine’s military pouring men and equipment into the contested area. “There is fighting still going on in the Kharkiv sector. The fiercest clashes are in Vovchansk and near Lyptsy,” Vitaly Ganchev told Russian news agencies.
-
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said Ukrainian forces were gradually pushing Russian troops out of parts of Kharkiv they have fought over since May. His top commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, predicted the Russians would try to press forward pending the arrival in Ukraine of sophisticated western equipment, including US-made F-16 fighter jets. Syrskyi also said Russian forces were concentrating their firepower on the Donetsk region, particularly on the Pokrovsk front.