North Korea, Russia deepen disaster response ties through 2029

North Korea and Russia have signed an agreement to expand bilateral cooperation on disaster management for the next three years, the North’s state media reported Tuesday.

Kim Chol-nam, the North’s minister of disaster management, and Aleksandr Kurenkov, Russia’s emergency situations minister, signed the agreement in Pyongyang the previous day to boost cooperation on the matter from 2027 to 2029, according to the Korean Central News Agency.

The “successes and experience gained by the two countries in the work to prevent disaster were exchanged and the issues of boosting bilateral exchange and cooperation were discussed,” according to the report.

A delegation from Russia’s emergency ministry arrived in Pyongyang on Sunday for talks with its North Korean counterpart on ways to deepen cooperation in disaster management.

The visit followed an agreement on specialist training and scientific and technical cooperation that the Russian ministry and its North Korean counterpart signed in December last year.

Yonhap