A version of this story appeared in the daily Threat Status newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive Threat Status delivered directly to your inbox each weekday.

SEOUL, South Korea — Call them “foul weather friends.”

The leaders of two heavily sanctioned states postured against the U.S. and its allies, Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, have much to discuss as Mr. Putin prepares to land in Pyongyang for a much-anticipated two-day summit.

---

---

In an op-ed that ran in North Korea media just hours before his scheduled arrival, Mr. Putin wrote that the two heavily sanctioned have a common interest in “resolutely oppos[ing]” Western ambitions to “hinder the establishment of a multipolarized world order based on mutual respect for justice.”

He also thanked Mr. Kim’s regime for supporting Russia’s actions in Ukraine, and wrote that he and Mr. Kim will upgrade trade and payment systems, while jointly opposing sanctions.

The Kremlin said this week that Mr. Putin will spend just one night in Pyongyang, before proceeding to Vietnam. However, considerable diplomatic foundation-laying has preceded the visit.

Against the backdrop of Russia’s war in Ukraine, the two men met last fall at a satellite launch center in the Russian Far East.

Rekindling an old relationship

Mr. Putin, making his first trip to North Korea in 24 years, is re-forging a relationship that eroded after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 as he seeks badly needed allies for his military campaign in Ukraine.

“For post-Gorbachev, pre-2014 Russia, North Korea was always toxic, but after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, Russia doesn’t care what the West thinks,” said Leonid Petrov, a Russian-born academic and North Korea watcher who is a fellow at Australia National University.

A display of bilateral bonhomie may take place against the backdrop of one area where Pyongyang boasts world-class competence: midnight parades of massed military manpower and weaponry.

The visit makes North Korea look like “a bigger player in global politics than it should be,” said Jenny Town, co-founder of the Stimson Center’s North Korean analytical website 38 North, told Seoul-based reporters.

More is at stake than chummy optics. The emerging North Korea-Russia axis offers both players multiple opportunities and allows Mr. Kim to loosen an uneasy long-term dependency on China.

After the Soviet Union’s dissolution, North Korea’s economy collapsed, leaving it massively reliant upon Beijing for goods including fuel, food and medicine, generating under-the-radar frictions.

Now, with Western enmity forcing Moscow to resurrect old partnerships, Pyongyang gains a friend that is a diplomatic, economic and military powerhouse.

North Korea gets “immediate and tangible results in terms of economic and agricultural cooperation and trade as well as military cooperation, which it has not had since the 1990s,” said Ms. Town.

However, closed-door discussions are unlikely to be aired.

“I don’t expect major pronouncements to come out,” Ms. Town said. “The activities they are doing are technically sanctioned to begin with, and there is a reluctance to put that down on paper.”

Upgraded relations carry rich potential: North Korea is geographically unsuited to agriculture, partly explaining its perennial food shortages, and lacks domestic energy sources. Russia is blessed with both grain and oil.

The Kremlin, heavily engaged in Ukraine, needs munitions to feed its hungry guns. North Korea boasts massive stockpiles and a huge military-industrial complex, estimated by Chun In-bum, a retired South Korean general, at about 26% of GDP.

The North’s artillery uses the same Warsaw Pact calibers – notably 152mm howitzer shells and 122mm tactical rockets – as Russia’s. There are signs that North Korea is now accelerating manufacturing.

“Anecdotal evidence suggests that early ammunition sent to Russia had a lot of quality problems and ammunition there now has higher performance, so it is presumably newly manufactured — not from stockpiles,” said Ms. Town, noting state media images recently showing Mr. Kim touring arms factories and urging greater production.

Russian TV pundits have discussed inviting North Korea’s disciplined and low-cost labor force to rebuild infrastructure conquered by Russian arms in Ukraine.

Another area where Russia could benefit is naval access to a warm-water North Korean port on the Sea of Japan. That would offer dispersal opportunities for Moscow’s Pacific Fleet, currently based in Vladivostok, a cold-water port.

It would also potentially deploy Russian troops on the same divided peninsula as 28,000 American soldiers.

“Being locked in frozen borders is inconvenient,” said Mr. Petrov, adding that a Russian presence in North Korea would be “strategically close to South Korea where U.S. troops are stationed.”

China lacks ports on the Sea of Japan, so expanded Russian reach “would be much in line with the growing tensions in the region,” Mr. Petrov said.

Andrei Lankov, a North Korea expert at Seoul’s Kookmin University, noted that the port of Rason in the northeast has dual-gauge rail tracks, enabling trains to roll directly to and from North Korea’s frontier and Russia’s vast rail network.

There are, however, tensions Mr. Putin and Mr. Kim will have to navigate.

One is Pyongyang’s fiercely independent national mindset: While U.S. troops have remained in the South since the Korean War ended in 1953, Chinese troops departed the North in 1958.

North Korea was “very persistent in getting rid of foreign troop presence in their country,” said Mr. Lankov. “They worked really hard to get the Chinese out.”

Russia is believed to have extended assistance to North Korea’s most recent reconnaissance satellite launch in May. After that launch failed, Mr. Kim was not pleased.

“At a recent plenum, Kim Jong-un said it was ’anti-revolutionary’ to be dependent on foreign military technology and technical assistance,” said Ms. Town.

More than transactional

While some believe the rejuvenated Moscow-Pyongyang axis is purely transactional, some think the warming could be sustainable.

Both countries are confronting a worldwide bloc of prosperous democracies. Russia, which holds a permanent seat on the Security Council, has moved to shelter North Korea from international sanctions, a matter of deep frustration to Washington.

“Their cooperation is not just about Ukraine; Russia talks about its ’War against the West’ and wants to build an alternative to the U.S.-led world order,” said Ms. Town. “There is reason to believe that Russia sees value in North Korea as a military partner … which does incentivize them to do more with North Korea beyond arms deals supplementing their war fighting in Ukraine.”