Russian President Vladimir Putin is to visit North Korea next month, marking a bold step in an accelerating international process to coax the reclusive country out of its half century of isolation. The visit could also have the aim of undermining US plans for an anti-missile shield in the Asia Pacific region.
"The president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, will visit Pyongyang soon at the invitation of the chairman of the Defence Committee of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Kim Jong-il," the Kremlin said yesterday.
The Russian Foreign Minister, Mr Ivan Ivanov, who visited North Korea in February to sign a post-Soviet friendship pact, told reporters the agenda would include world security and economic co-operation.
The visit, the first to any part of Korea by a Russian leader, draws Russia firmly into the process of reconciliation on the Korean peninsula, after a decade of mutual distrust caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union.
On Monday Mr Kim Jung-il will meet South Korean President Kim Dae-jung in Pyongyang for the first all-Korean summit since the 1950-53 Korean War. The omens for a successful outcome are good. President Kim is likely to offer massive aid to stabilise the northern regime and persuade Pyongyang to start reforms and allow more access for separated families.
In a gesture of goodwill, President Kim is taking a present of two Jindo dogs, pure-bred animals indigenous to the remote southern island of Jindo and noted for their loyalty, and the North Korean leader may give him in return two Pungsang dogs, a breed found only in North Korea.
In a flurry of unprecedented activity in recent weeks, North Korea has established diplomatic links with Italy and Australia and is now seeking formal ties with New Zealand and Canada. The United States will soon implement plans to lift economic and travel sanctions against North Korea following Pyongyang's agreement to rein in its nuclear programme, halt long-range missile tests and engage in broader dialogue.
Mr Putin is likely to visit North Korea on July 19th or 20th, between trips to Beijing and the Japan summit of the Group of Eight leading industrialised nations.
The most intriguing questions arising from his initiative is how it will affect Washington's long-term plan to erect an anti-missile shield in the Asia Pacific region.
This idea is strongly opposed by China and North Korea, and President Clinton failed to convince Mr Putin in Moscow last week of the merits of the shield as a protection against attack from "rogue" states such as North Korea. The Russian leader can undermine the US case by establishing a relationship of trust with Pyongyang, under which it could affirm North Korea's non-aggressive intentions.
Mr Mikhail Titarenko, head of the Far East Institute, said in Moscow that Mr Putin and Mr Kim Jong-il would discuss the US proposal to alter the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty between the US and the Soviet Union to enable it to build a National Missile Defence to intercept incoming missiles.
Russia has tried to influence Korea's destiny for more than a century, beginning with a treaty in 1884 aimed at the formation of a pro-Russian Korean government to balance growing Chinese and Japanese influence in the peninsula. Korea, which shares a 10-mile border with Russia near Vladivostock, had become an area of strategic interest to tsarist Russia with the completion of the Trans-Siberian railway in the late 19th century.
Japan defeated Russia in a war in 1904, eclipsing Moscow's influence in the peninsula for 40 years, but after the second World War northern Korea above the 38th parallel was "assigned" to the victorious Soviet Union. Moscow never set up a formal occupation administration in Pyongyang, backing instead a former Japanese guerrilla fighter Kim il Sung as leader of a communist government.
After the Korean War, which left the country divided along the 38th parallel, North Korea played off its ideological allies, China and the Soviet Union, against each other, but when then Soviet leader, Mr Mikhail Gorbachev, in the dying days of Soviet power in 1990 established relations with Southern Korea and withdrew its aid from Northern Korea, the friendship between Moscow and Pyongyang cooled considerably.