The 10th session of the Fourteenth National People’s Congress of the DPRK, is best known for its radical reversal of the policy on relations between North and South Korean. However, specialists may also find some of the other issues discussed during the session to be of interest. In addition to the foreign policy issues discussed earlier, in his speech, “On the Next Tasks for the Prosperity and Development of the Republic and the Improvement of the People’s Welfare” Kim Jong-un made…

The military and political section of Kim Jong-un’s keynote speech began by summing up the current situation. “Far from improving, the security situation of our state has continued to deteriorate day by day, and today it is facing a more serious risk of war than any other region in the world.” Therefore “preparations for the great event have become an unfortunate reality.” Kim also notes the importance of paying attention to the situation in the Middle East. “The deputies present at this session should not consider the horrors…

South Korean politics has many individuals with the surname Lee. This includes Lee Jae-myung, the leader of the Democratic Party of Korea (DPK), Lee Jun-seok, a former conservative leader who began his independent career at age 38, and Lee Nak-yon, who is on his way to become the leader of a breakaway faction. The 71-year-old former DPK chairman, a four-term lawmaker, served as prime minister from 2017 to 2020 during the Moon Jae-in administration. As both premier and party leader, Lee demonstrated his competence as an administrator…

The author barely completed one digest, when events on the peninsula rapidly developed. The New Year vacations were not much different from work in terms of preparing materials for the New Eastern Outlook. On December 17, mere thirty minutes after launching a short-range missile towards the Sea of Japan, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) released a statement from the military department. The statement claimed that the results of the second meeting of the South Korea-US Nuclear Security Consultative Group constituted an open declaration of nuclear confrontation…

The development of relations between the Russian Federation and the DPRK continues to deepen after the Chairman of State Affairs, Comrade Kim Jong-un, paid a visit to Russia. A mirror response to the visit to Pyongyang by the Russian delegation headed by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was the visit of North Korean Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui to Moscow on January 14-18, 2024, during which she was received by the President of the Russian Federation V.V. Putin…

From December 26 to 30, 2023, Pyongyang hosted the 9th Enlarged Plenum of 8th WPK Central Committee, which summarized the results of the past year and set plans for the future. While much of the country was celebrating the arrival of 2024, the author was analyzing the materials of the plenum, adhering to the principle of ‘how you meet the new year, so you spend it. There were many interesting findings. To begin with, the structure of the plenum has already become part of the tradition…

This is the second part of the digest on inter-Korean tensions, dedicated to the DPRK actions. See the previous article to learn what the United States and the Republic of Korea did during the same period. Early in the morning on September 2, 2023, “a missile launch exercise was conducted to simulate a tactical nuclear attack to warn enemies of an actual nuclear war danger.” The launch came two days after the US and the ROK completed their 11-day Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise…

We would like to bring to your attention the next digest of “moving towards red lines” on the Korean Peninsula. Since the articles should be kept concise, the author has to divide this narrative into two parts: first, with the South, then, with the North in focus. On October 5, 2023, during hearings in the US Senate, a well-known American expert on the countries of the Korean Peninsula from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Victor Cha, proposed to develop and adopt a new policy providing for prevention measures to neutralize the DPRK missile threat…

The final text in the series on the North Korean satellite launch will focus on the military and political response of “the southern side”, which had several aspects. The first aspect is the strengthening of the US strategic forces. An aircraft carrier group including the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson and the Los Angeles-class nuclear submarine Santa Fe (SSN-763) arrived in Busan before the launch and visited the Navy base on the Jeju-do island after it. It is alleged, that on October 23, in response to such actions, North Korea launched an unidentified ballistic…

NEO wrote about the possible termination of the inter-Korean military agreement (CMA, Comprehensive Military Agreement ) quite recently, mentioning that its zeroing will take place after the launch of the DPRK satellite. And so it happened. Recall that even before the launch, the Administration of the President of South Korea assumed that the CMA “could be suspended in the event North Korea goes ahead with its planned space rocket launch.” Conservative media…

North Korea’s successful launch of a satellite on November 21 has led to another wave of speculation both about the satellite’s capabilities and about potential military-technological cooperation between Moscow and Pyongyang. This is largely due to the syndrome noted more than once, in which anti-Pyongyang propaganda first comes up with certain clichés and then begins to believe in them. The DPRK is seen as an “Evil State” and thus incapable of real success. Any real achievements are therefore dismissed – “the new housing developments were built to distract the population from economic…

The internal politics of the DPRK is a rather closed thing, and quite often we draw conclusions about the processes taking place there and the state of affairs in the administrative system from indirect signs. For example, watching Kim Jong-un during negotiations with Putin or Shoigu, one can see that he turns to the interpreter on purpose and speaks louder and clearer so that the interpreter can better understand his thoughts and convey them to his interlocutor. At the same time, the standard cultural code, which is very noticeable in the Republic of Korea, says that a high-ranking Korean…