In October 2024, the DPRK’s defensive activity in the border zone with South Korea was visibly completed. The possibility of road and rail transportation between the two Korean states has been cut off

Some historical background

The routes were built under the Japanese and have been repeatedly blocked, then restored, and have more of a symbolic than a practical value, since, as noted by the Russian-speaking Korean scholar Andrey Lankov, “there has been no real movement for about 80 years.” The restoration of the roads and railways was seriously discussed in 2000, when the leaders of the two Koreas held their first summit. However, the traffic remained irregular, and only the Kaesong section was used, as it served a South Korean industrial complex in North Korean territory and employing North Korean workers. And after South Korea closed this industrial complex in Kaesong in 2016, the use of the route actually ceased.

The last attempt to maintain the routes occurred during the “Olympic warming.” In 2018, the two Koreas agreed to reconnect and modernize the roads and railways in an atmosphere of rapprochement and held a ceremony to mark the beginning of construction work. But “after the inconclusive summit in Hanoi between then US President Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un in 2019, the project did not go ahead” and evil tongues claim that this was due not to the obstruction of the United States, but to the reluctance of the South Korean authorities to provide real assistance to the North instead of just holding ceremonial events.

According to Seoul, “the project to connect the roads and railways included 133 million US dollars in credit from South Korea, which took the form of loans of construction equipment at the request of........

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