to Russia’s missile program, according to an expert analysis being published Monday and classified assessments by American intelligence agencies.” The report went on to detail how US analysts had studied photos of Kim inspecting the new missiles’ rocket motors and concluded that they derived from old Soviet designs. The motors are thought to be powerful enough that “a single missile could hurl 10 thermonuclear warheads between continents.” The focal point of the activity is thought to be a missile factory in Dnipro, Ukraine, which in Cold War days made the deadliest missiles in the Soviet arsenal.17
The North Korea/Russia/Ukraine missile story has been the strongest sign yet of a phenomenon that remains largely unknown to the general public: the tightening embrace between Russia and North Korea. Putin first visited North Korea in 2000; his ties with Kim Jong-un’s father, Kim Jong-il, were fairly strong, but most observers continue to associate the Hermit Kingdom with its traditional benefactor, China. Putin’s Russia, however, is moving closer and closer to a newly meaningful alliance with Pyongyang. Multiple reports in April 2017 indicated that Russia was massing its troops along its border with the Hermit Kingdom in the aftermath of a tense stare-down between the United States, Pyongyang, and Beijing over one of North Korea’s recent missile tests. Putin took no action against Kim when North Korea fired a ballistic missile in February 2017. He has even defended the North Korean nuclear program as one of self-defense. And now, with the Ukraine story, we have more insight into why he would take such a position. (A few weeks after the Times report on the Ukrainian factory ran, Russia flew nuclear bombers over the Korean Peninsula, flexing its muscles on the same day that the United States and South Korea were conducting military exercises.)
Russia has become North Korea’s leading fuel supplier. Moscow and Pyongyang are finalizing a labor-and-immigration agreement. And North Korea’s state-controlled news agency lists Russia as a top ally of the DPRK. (Putin even congratulated North Korea by sending “a friendly greeting to your country and your people on the occasion of the 71st anniversary of Korean liberation.”18)
Then, on September 3, 2017, North Korea detonated a powerful device underground that it claimed was a hydrogen bomb—and it further claimed that the bomb could be put on an ICBM that could reach the United States. The blast equaled the magnitude of a 6.3 earthquake. A few weeks later, the UN passed the harshest sanctions against Pyongyang yet—but those sanctions weren’t nearly as strong as Washington wanted, because Russia, in tandem with China, had watered them down. Washington had previously sought a total ban on oil shipments to the North, but Russia and China killed that provision and forced the United States to settle for mere limits on the country’s oil imports. Instead of a halt on all oil flowing into North Korea, the imports were capped at their current levels. Only after weakening the sanctions did Russia and China agree to vote for them. The United States was effectively blocked from taking stronger action. Teaming up at the UN is just one element of the deepening Russia-China partnership. Recent months have also seen greater security cooperation between the two countries. As they continue to find common ground against the United States, the two countries held their first joint naval drill in the South China Sea and both have condemned US plans to deploy a missile shield in South Korea. A Russian general said that their military was working with China to counter an expansion of US missile defenses.
Putin’s support of Iran, meanwhile, shows no sign of lessening. Moscow continues to be a vital supplier of nuclear equipment and other weapons to Tehran. The Persian Gulf superpower continues to play a central role in Putin’s global vision of controlling energy supplies, checking American influence, and building out Russia’s regional and global reach. Putin has met with enormous success on all these goals in recent years, but has done so especially in his desire to become a Middle East power broker. The Syrian War has been one piece of the strategy; the Russia-Iran alliance has been another. A bloody and destabilized Middle East filled with ISIS-destroyed failed states and hemmed in by Russia and Iran to the north and east suits him fine. It leaves him in a similar position to that which Stalin found himself in at the end of World War II: as the grand military power bestriding a swath of “blood lands” (as a contemporary historian has described them). The Moscow-Tehran partnership has the added benefit of diminishing the influence and example of Sunni supremacists such as ISIS in the countries and regions of Russia’s near east—for example, Chechnya.
Putin has also pushed back on President Trump’s description of Iran as a terrorist state, lauding Tehran as a “good neighbor and reliable and stable partner.”19 And it must be, considering that, according to retired general Jack Keane, the Iranians are helping Moscow run arms to the Taliban in Afghanistan.20 It’s striking that Tehran would facilitate Russia’s assistance of the Taliban—the Iranian regime is Shia, the Taliban, Sunni. But Russia and Iran share a common goal: to destabilize the United States and erode public support for its mission in Afghanistan. For that, the compromises are worth making.
At home, Putin has been relentless and purposeful in his fortification of Russian military power and tightening control on Russian civil liberties and the political process. He has upgraded his military and nuclear arsenal.
At a speech to his top military advisors, Putin declared that the Russian military “is ready to defeat any country that dares challenge it.” He continued: “We can say with certainty: we are stronger now than any potential aggressor. Anyone.”21 That pointedly includes the United States. But Putin isn’t satisfied. He has pushed his brass to “strengthen the strategic nuclear forces,” believing that these forces “must be taken to a higher level of quality so that they are capable of neutralizing any military threats.”22 Specifically, he wants to fortify Russia’s nuclear triad—that is, its nuclear weapons based on land, in submarines, and in long-range bombers. And he pushes for these measures with renewed confidence, since he was successful in negotiating deep reductions to the United States’ nuclear arsenal—without corresponding cuts on Moscow’s part.
It’s not all strengthening arsenals and building stockpiles, either. Putin has begun moving these missiles into strategic areas, with recent reports suggesting that he has moved “nuclear-capable missiles close to Poland and Lithuania”—two countries in Russia’s traditional sphere of influence that have embraced Westernism and that he hopes to destabilize. A Putin advisor warned that “impudent behavior” could have “nuclear consequences.”23
While he strengthens his military hand, Putin tamps down opposition in Russia, despite deep despair in the Russian Federation. March 2017 saw the biggest outbreak of protests in Russia in five years, with more than a hundred arrests and warnings given over loudspeakers urging demonstrators to “‘think of the consequences’ and disperse now.”24 The protesters were angry about corruption allegations involving the Russian prime minister. Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was jailed for fifteen days after the demonstrations.
The activism was notable because many in Russia have lost heart with political resistance, with a large portion of Putin opponents either demoralized or intimidated. Putin has pushed for new laws that make public assembly more difficult and he has tightened restrictions on speech on the Internet—especially when it’s critical of the government—and political advocacy. Journalists who have reported critically about his rule wind up dead with alarming frequency. Putin also enacted laws cracking down on NGOs. The primary restriction is known as the “foreign agent law,” and it requires NGOs that receive funding from outside Russia to register with the government as foreign agents and subject themselves to audits, with heavy fines imposed on those that don’t comply.
At the moment, it is difficult to tell whether the reawakening of Russian discontent will pose a problem for Putin. He has acted in typically strong fashion to squelch it, but one must hold out at least the possibility that his success in controlling the electorate, as has been the case with most authoritarian leaders, has a finite shelf life—though that might still mean many more years of control to come.
