More than 70 years after the nominal end of the Korean War, North and South Korea find themselves at loggerheads 7,000 kilometers west of their heavily fortified border — on opposing sides of the war in Ukraine.
Moscow and Kyiv have looked to Pyongyang and Seoul, respectively, for munitions and nonlethal support as the conflict in Ukraine grinds its way through a third year since Russia invaded its neighbor.
The stakes have also been raised significantly on the Korean Peninsula, scholars say. A meeting between President Vladimir Putin and leader Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang in June elevated Russia-North Korea ties into a formal military mutual protection alliance, partly in return for more aid from the North in Ukraine, and for the first time brought the possibility of North Korean troops on the ground there in some capacity.
The South Korean response was swift. Not only did Seoul immediately say it would reconsider its longstanding refusal to provide lethal weapons to Ukraine, within a month it signed its own upgraded defense ties with Washington: an alliance codifying the use of U.S. nuclear weapons to defend South Korea against nuclear threats from the North.
“We are now poised to respond quickly and effectively to any kind of North Korean nuclear threat,” South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol said on his return from this month’s NATO summit in Washington. Yoon stressed that Seoul is determined to work closely with both the U.S. and Japan to counter what he called “illegal” military contact by North Korea and Russia.
North Korea’s state media decried the deal, accusing Seoul and Washington of escalating their “nuclear threat” and threatening to make them pay “an unimaginably harsh price.”
The rapid U.S.-South Korea response reflects the scale of alarm that some observers registered after the Moscow-Pyongyang deal, under which the pair agreed to provide each other with military assistance if one of them is brought into “a state of war,” a pact that has worsened the ever-present worries in East Asia over the possibility of war.
Defense analysts have suggested that technical assistance from Russia could have been behind North Korea’s successful launch of a satellite late last year, and suggest that such support could make it possible for Pyongyang to make significant strides in its nuclear development.
But the splashy show of solidarity between the two authoritarian states has “backfired,” said Kim Jae-chun, a professor of international relations at Sogang University in Seoul.
