Russia and North Korea will hold joint naval exercises in 2012—their first, Russia’s military said on Tuesday. The announcement follows on the heels of a recent summit between the nations, indicating that the two may be seeking a closer partnership.
On Tuesday, Russian Lieutenant Colonel Igor Muginov told Russian media that the exercises will happen next year and focus on search and rescue operations, but did not provide any further details, according to Voice of America. So far, there have been no official reactions from the U.S., South Korea, or Japan to the announcement.
North Korea expert and author Professor Stephan Haggard of University of California, was somewhat surprised and very critical of the planned operations, calling them “incredibly retrograde” and said that they “appear to provide support to North Korea in an unhelpful way” in an email to The Epoch Times.
Haggard does not feel that this move by Russia will make it easier to get the stalled Six Party talks on North Koreas nuclear weapons program—between the United States, Russia, Japan, China, and the two Koreas—online again.
“I see anything that ‘sides’ with North Korea as making it more difficult to get them back to the talks in a productive way,” he wrote. “It provides the North Koreans more space.”
The naval cooperation was decided on during the summit between North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong-Il and Russian president Dimitri Medvedev in the Russian hinterland recently. The talks then mostly concerned trade and economic assistance, such as a Russian gas pipeline through the Korean Peninsula.
The meeting was perceived by many as a clear sign that Russia now wants to play a more important role on the Korean Peninsula, where the two major outside forces have traditionally been the United States and China. Tuesday’s announcement seems to point strongly in the same direction.
The plans of joint naval exercises have not been a secret, at least not since late August. On August 22, the Commander of Russia’s Eastern Military District, Konstantin Sidenko, travelled to North Korea to discuss the matter, according to a post on the Russian navy’s home page of the same date.
In the post, a spokesman for the local military authorities said that the meetings would be related to “resumption and further development of military and naval cooperation between the two countries, possible terms of Russian-North Korean humanitarian exercises, exchange of friendly visits between Russian and North Korean Warships,” but also “possible land and naval search-and-rescue exercises.”
Scott Snyder, Senior Fellow for Korea Studies and Director of the Program on U.S.-Korea studies at the Council of Foreign Relations, does not feel the planned exercises are cause for alarm, though he thinks the report will “raise some eyebrows.”
“Given North Korea’s relative military isolation, the fact of joint exercises is notable, but it does not seem likely at this stage that such exercises by themselves will cause further reverberations,” he commented via email.
In August, the United States and South Korea, who regularly hold joint drills, conducted naval exercises in the Yellow Sea off the West coast of the Korean Peninsula.
As late as 2008, Russia held joint anti-terror naval exercises with South Korea. It remains to be seen how South Korea will react to the planned Russian-North Korean cooperation.
