As Kim Jong-un himself announced at a New Year’s Eve event in Pyongyang, 2025 was an ‘unforgettable year’ for North Korea. During the final weekend of the year, the Supreme Leader supervised a ‘nuclear-capable’ long-range strategic cruise missile test, which he termed an ‘exercise of war deterrence’ against the ‘security threats’ facing Pyongyang.

The test followed a week of oily letters between Kim and his new best friend, none other than Vladimir Putin. The Russian leader lauded the ‘heroic dispatch’ of North Korean troops to assist Russia’s war against Ukraine as an example of the ‘militant fraternity’ between Pyongyang and Moscow. Even if dynamics in the Ukraine war change this year, the West cannot afford to overlook the mounting security threats the ties between these two ‘invincible’ allies present.

Seven years ago, Kim and Donald Trump were in the throes of exchanging what the US president infamously called ‘love letters’. Fast forward to 2026, and Putin has taken Trump’s place. In response to Putin’s missive, the North Korean leader gushed that Pyongyang’s relations with Moscow had become a ‘sincerest alliance of sharing blood, life, and death in the same trench’. It was a not-too-subtle reference to North Korea’s deployment of approximately 14,000 to 15,000 troops to the Kursk region, which, Kim added, would be ‘eternally recorded’ in........

© The Spectator