by ANDREW SALMON
As a denuclearized and now devastated Ukraine strengthens the raison d’etre for North Korea’s nuclear armory, Pyongyang is pushing ahead with a wide range of weapons tests as voices in Russia question sanctions.
While Pyongyang is supporting close partner Russia at the UN, experts say Ukraine’s dire fate is driving a deep nail into the coffin of denuclearization. That concept – which many consider a daydream – dominates US interactions with North Korea.
Kim Jong Un’s regime has been pressing ahead with a high-tempo series of weapons tests this year, ranging from train-launched ballistic missiles to hypersonics. There are worries in Seoul that with Washington distracted by Ukraine, a new South Korean president taking office in May and joint South Korea-US spring military drills upcoming, an intercontinental ballistic missile may be next.
If so, it would be the first since the high-tension year of 2017.
Pyongyang’s active testing regimen of 2022, analysts say, is aimed less at sending political signals to Seoul or Washington and more about upgrading North Korean assets from a deterrent to an offensive armory.
That could, feasibly, allow Pyongyang to advance on Seoul while keeping ally the United States at arm’s length.
As a strategy, that would mirror the way Russia’s nuclear arsenal has halted an overt NATO intervention in Ukraine. North Korea is not only nuclear-armed, its conventional forces are almost twice the size of South Korea’s.
As Moscow reels from Western sanctions, on March 17, a representative of the Duma quoted a senior North Korean official as he suggested that Russia should deepen its relationship with North Korea and cease to be bound by international sanctions against it.
Iraq, Libya and Ukraine
It is unlikely to escape the attention of anyone prowling Pyongyang’s corridors of power that three states – Iraq, Libya and Ukraine – that abandoned weapons of mass destruction programs suffered catastrophic invasions.
North Korean state media commented on the Western assault on Libya, but has remained silent on Ukraine, the latest of the three to suffer a conventional assault by a superior force.
Under the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, Ukraine, together with Belarus and Kazakhstan, agreed to give up nuclear arms in exchange for security guarantees from Russia, the UK and the US.
Pyongyang’s radio silence on a disarmed Ukraine’s dire misfortune is due to its unwillingness to criticize key partner Russia, said Go Myong-hyun, who watches North Korea from Seoul’s Asan Institute.
Indeed, North Korea was, on March 3, one of only five countries to oppose a motion to condemn Russia for its assault on Ukraine, which passed overwhelmingly at an emergency session of the UN General Assembly.
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