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South Korean, Russian officials holds close-door talks over North Korea

Published: 21 Dec. 2025, 19:36

A photo showing members of the 528th Engineer Regiment, the North Korean unit dispatched to Russia, is aired during a celebratory performance welcoming the engineering troops back home on Dec. 13. [KOREA CENTRAL TV]

A South Korean government official recently held closed-door talks in Moscow with Russian officials overseeing North Korea policy, signaling a possible recalibration of Seoul-Moscow relations as discussions to end the war in Ukraine continue.

According to diplomatic sources on Sunday, a Foreign Ministry official in charge of North Korea policy visited Moscow and met with Oleg Burmistrov, the ambassador-at-large of Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. While the meeting was not publicly announced, it reportedly took place as part of broader diplomatic consultations following Foreign Minister Cho Hyun’s closed-door policy briefing to President Lee Jae Myung on Friday, during which he addressed postwar scenarios in Ukraine.

“We provided a comprehensive report on how we should safeguard our national interests in the event of an end to the war in Ukraine,” Cho told reporters in his briefing to the president on Friday. The timing of the Seoul-Moscow talks suggests they may have been conducted within the same strategic framework.

Analysts say the meeting reflects a broader need to engage Russia diplomatically amid its deepening ties with North Korea, especially since Pyongyang reportedly sent military personnel to support Moscow’s war effort in October last year. Experts suggest Seoul may be seeking to coordinate with Moscow to bring Pyongyang back to the negotiating table.

Apart from a brief ministerial-level meeting between Foreign Minister Cho and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in September, this is believed to be the first official contact between the two governments regarding North Korea since reports of North Korean troop deployments to Russia.

In their September meeting, Cho conveyed Korea’s “grave concerns” over continued North Korea-Russia military cooperation. Lavrov, in turn, condemned joint military exercises by the United States and its Asian allies as “provocative,” defending Pyongyang’s actions.

Meanwhile, North Korea slammed recent nuclear armament remarks from a Japanese official in a statement titled “The war criminal state Japan's attempt to go nuclear must be prevented at any cost as it will bring mankind a great disaster.”

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attends a completion ceremony for a local industrial plant in Sinpho on Dec. 19, according to the Rodong Sinmun on Dec. 21. [RODONG SINMUN]

“The history of aggression of Japan clearly proves that if Japan, a war criminal state, possesses nuclear weapons, Asian countries will suffer a horrible nuclear disaster, as will mankind in general,” said a director of the North’s Foreign Ministry’s Japan research institute in a statement carried by the Korean Central News Agency on Sunday.

According to reports from Kyodo News and other outlets, a senior official in the Prime Minister’s Office of Japan who is responsible for national security under the Takaichi administration told reporters on Friday that “Japan should possess nuclear weapons.” The official, who stressed that the opinion was strictly personal, cited the growing nuclear threats from China, Russia and North Korea as justification.

In its statement, Pyongyang described Japan as a “rogue state capable of arming with nuclear weapons and igniting another war of aggression once the occasion comes,” and warned that “Japan's true purpose of crying out about the threats from neighboring countries is to justify its moves to become a military giant, with nuclearization as its ultimate goal.”

Lim Eul-chul, a professor at Kyungnam University’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies, said the statement reflects “North Korea’s strategic intent to exploit worsening China-Japan relations.”

“This is not just a denunciation of Japan but a reinforcement of Pyongyang’s claim that its nuclear arsenal is a legitimate exercise of self-defense. It also signals tighter anti-U.S. and anti-Japanese alignment with China and Russia,” Prof. Lim said.

This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
BY SHIM SEOK-YONG [[email protected]]