Kim Jong-un pays key attention to relations with Russia

North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un “pays major attention to the North-Korea-Russia relations of friendship and cooperation,” which have been “permanently developing in various areas, including politics, economy and culture, in the past 65 years,” North Korean Foreign Minister Pak Ui-chun said on Friday at a reception at the Russian embassy in Pyongyang on the occasion of the 65th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries. This year alone saw successful political dialogue between the foreign ministers of the two countries, a ceremony on the occasion of the completion of the overhaul of a railway section linking Russia’s Khasan station and North Korea’s port of Rajin, he said, adding that a recent Russian-language contest among Pyongyang schoolchildren helped to “promote better understanding between the younger generations of the two countries.” Sixty-five years ago, the Soviet Union “was the first to recognize the young sovereign state on the Korean land,” Russian Ambassador in Pyongyang Alexander Timonin said. The establishment of diplomatic relations, in his words, was preceded by “years of heroic struggle of Korean patriots for independence, who fought shoulder to shoulder with soldiers of the Soviet Army, which liberated the Korean Peninsula from Japanese colonialists in August 1945.” The Russian diplomat expressed confidence that the implementation of North Korea’s biggest investment project, Khasan-Rajin, will give a fresh impetus to further development of relations between the two countries. “Our key task of the moment is to preserve and develop the best traditions that emerged during the years of good-neighbourly cooperation between Russia and North Korea,” he said. “In many aspects, it depends on the stabilization of the situation in the Korean Peninsula. Russia stands for the settlement of all Korean problems by political and diplomatic efforts, through the formation an efficient system for maintaining peace in the region, the resumption of six-party talks on the nuclear problem of the peninsula.”