North Korea News Podcast by NK News - Opposition leader on DPRK, Russian envoy’s interview and US-Japan nuclear pledge

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

The leader of South Korea’s main opposition party called for renewed dialogue with North Korea this week, while emphasizing the need to maintain strong military readiness amid heightened tensions on the Korean Peninsula.  NK New’ Correspondent Jeongmin Kim joins the podcast to discuss what Lee Jae-myung, the current frontrunner in multiple presidential polls, has to […]

Explore the unofficial world of DPRK-inspired apparel at NK News Shop. Dive into a captivating collection of North Korea-themed t-shirts, hoodies and more at the NK News Shop. From the popular Daedonggang beer t-shirts to the adventurous air-cordior designs, each and the world. Hello listeners and welcome to the NK News Podcast. I'm your host, Jack Ho's Wedsuit and today it is Tuesday the 11th of February 2025. It's almost Valentine's Day and it's almost because something big is happening tomorrow. What is it? Jongmin, it's seventh anniversary of NK News podcast. That's right Can you believe that I've been making this thing for seven years now since just before the Pyeongchang Olympics?

2018 so your baby's entering an elementary school. That's human terms, I guess We got to keep going until my baby can legally drink alcohol. Yes, exactly. It's only 11 more years to go. Welcome back on the show, Jongmin. Thank you. And let's give our listeners a plug and tell them that they should listen also to the Korea Pro podcast, which is hosted by you and by John Lee and by Junha Park. It's fantastic. Everyone should listen. It comes out every Friday. A little bit more ranty than the KNews version.

It is a bit more ranty. That's right recently due to you know recent situations in South Korea. I know sometimes I listen to John Lee and I feel like I wish I could let go like that but you know I've got to stay calm. Okay so we've got three great stories picked out for this week. Let's start with one that well it brings together South Korean politics and North Korea. Well, South Korean politicians are very much informally in presidential election mode. So they are doing a lot of speeches recently, especially the Democratic Party leader, Lee Jae Myung, in the meeting, major meeting yesterday with the government officials at the parliament. Lee Jae Myung did this mostly domestic politics speech including like constitutional amendment related issues and economic issues, but also he dropped in some North Korea mention.

Okay, now as much as I'd like to talk about the constitutional amendment issues and how he may be the one man standing. Check on Korea Pro. Yeah, exactly. Check Korea Pro. So let's talk about what's he saying about North Korea? Because I know that since Kim Jong-un came out at the end of 2023 and says unification off the agenda, South Korea is not a partner,

a lot of people on the progressive side of South Korean politics have kind of been prepared to just sort of let North Korea as an issue kind of drop and remove it from the agenda. I remember former presidential aide to Moon Jae-in, Im Jong-sok gave a speech in which he said, let's just stop talking about unification and let the next generation handle it. But Lee Jae-myeong is not content to do that.

He's going to talk about it. Exactly. But also, when it comes to Im Jong-seok, first of all, he was kind of purged, not purged, informally purged from the Democratic Party because he didn't get the seat in the general elections. And right now, since the UN's martial law on December 3, the question that I guess gets asked the most when it comes to South Korean politicians related to North Korea is, will Lee Jae-min go for dialogue? Right? But if you look at the speech, he did name Trump North Korea, but it's very much deprioritized. And he is sort of toeing the line between pro-dialogue, but he is still maintaining some very conservative sounding remarks like, you know, denuclearization and trying to deter North Korea nuclear threat

through very strong and powerful South Korean military. Right. So he's a pro-defense, but he's also not anti-engagement. So it's very Biden, I should say. The wordings are very Biden. Are there South Korean precedents for this as well? So it's very Biden, I should say. The wordings are very Biden. Are there South Korean precedents for this as well? Well, when it comes to previous progressive South Korean politicians, they usually, they do say that military is important, but they usually don't link the

engagement issue together into one block in the speech. So it's a little bit new here. What do you think? A little bit new. It sounds more pragmatic. It looks like he generally understands that North Korea does not really want engagement right now, which he mentions. Yes. North Korea went for anti-unification sort of policy line. And he says, despite us trying to reinforce our military power, we should keep the door open, basically.

Okay. Well, here's the question. Given that this is in the sort of unofficial election stumping for the vote that may come if the Constitutional Court upholds the impeachment, is this likely to be a vote winner? No, because recently, if you look at, I think when the Democratic Party sort of includes

pro-engagement sort of line, it's two things. One is it's like the legacy establishment sort of wording they have to include to uphold the agreements that the predecessors like Kim Dae-jung or Ohm Yoon who are very much revered still by the progressives. They don't want to downplay or totally neglect the Sunshine policy. Exactly, exactly. So that's one thing. Another thing is they still remember the golden age of the 80% plus approval rate of Moon Jae-in during 2018. So they do remember that. But things changed a lot since then. If you look at the annual polls by major institutions in South Korea, people increasingly

don't really care about unification. They increasingly tend to think that North Korea will never denuclearize. So this is not going to move the moderates, which will be swing voters this time around, but it will help maybe maintain the base a little bit, but they're not going anywhere. They're not going anywhere. Now speaking of North Korea not denuclearizing, that leads us very smoothly into our next story, which is a wide ranging interview that Russia's ambassador in Pyongyang, Matsugori, gave to Russian media, in which he also said that North Korea is not going to be denuclearized. His main point is he sort of mentioned that he welcomes the idea of North Korea and the US summit sort of resuming,

which is a lot of people are expecting, including us in chat, but he said that North Korea will not denuclearize in the terms of what the US ones or South Korea ones, you know, and you know, they have to listen to what North Korea actually wants and what the perceived threats are basically. Right. Does he think that North Korea would be interested in renegotiating or reopening discussions with Donald Trump? It wasn't clear in the interview. I think that's why he put it as we welcomed the idea of it. Not that he supports that Kim Jong-un supports it or whatnot. And Kim Jong-un hasn't really responded to that positively. Now Ambassador Matsugori has been in North Korea for a long time. Does that mean he has more of an insight into what North Korea is thinking? Well probably because he has talked to his counterparts within North Korea's thinking? Well, probably because he has talked to his counterparts within North Korea, including the MFA people, the foreign ministry people and whatnot more frequently.

But then even if you are an ambassador based in Pyongyang for so long, you don't really get to talk to Kim Jong-un himself for so many times, right? And it really, really depends on what the leader himself thinks in North Korea. So yes and no, I think. I've got a little quote from him here. He says, if the United States truly wants a dialogue, it will need to radically adjust its approach. It's almost what North Korea says all the time, isn't it? You've got to change your hostile stance. Yeah, exactly. And he's like, it's off the table. Denuclearization is off the table.

Yeah. Now he also had some things to say about the Russia DPRK alliance. So he mentioned this interesting term, Russia and North Korea now an allied relationship. So he Russia is definitely interpreting the treaty as an allied relationship. That is very interesting. And it sounds like he wants to get it going for the time being. Right. And, you know, of course, he still he didn't mention mention anything about the deployment of North Korean troops to Russia. So yeah, that's, I mean how do you talk about an alliance and then not talk about the biggest thing that's concretizing the alliance or operational?

Elephant in the room, really. Yeah, it's the elephant in the room, isn't it? Yeah, now he also highlighted the resumption of internships of students back to Kim Il-sung University and students coming back. So really, Russia-North Korea relations are hot right now. So related story actually from Anton and from me yesterday as well. Actually the student visa, the student number increased in the past year, but a lot of experts are saying that... Student visa is granted to North Koreans to go and study in Russia Exactly North Koreans going to Russia

There there has been a spike in Russian tours visiting North Korea as well It seems but but especially North Korean students going to Russia it increased and it's Anton's take and experts take um is that this might be disguising a lot of non-student visitors to Russia including disguising a lot of non-student visitors to Russia, including workers and troops. And recently, just yesterday, the NIS South Korean spy agencies said that there has been thousands, they say thousands of North Korean workers and nearly going to Russian construction sites. Ah, yes, because students doing a part-time job may not be sanctioned, but people on work visas definitely would be because

everyone was supposed to send North Korean workers back to North Korea after the 2017 sanctions. So now this way they can get around it by just calling them students. Right. Also, there has been a lot of visits being noted for business and also students. Okay. So that's some creative visa work there. Yeah. Okay. Now our third story, we see that Prime Minister Ishmael of Japan met with the newly re-inaugurated

President Donald Trump. I'm not sure if, well, he wasn't the first one, but anyway, he was one of the first, one of the handful of leaders to get into Washington and have a summit with him. I think it was a second after Israel, isn't it? After Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel, right. Which also means that because of the things that Donald Trump said at the press conference

with Prime Minister Netanyahu, that this visit with Prime Minister Ishmael was kind of a little bit overlooked or a little bit forgotten or pushed to the back pages. Unless you're South Korean who was monitoring this, looking at it like very FOMO sort of mode because we don't have a leader right now. Like we have have an acting president but we don't have like an active actual president to do a summit like this. Yes. Okay. Now what did they talk about particularly in reference to North Korea?

When it comes to North Korea, the question came to Ishiba initially about the potential resumption of the, you know, denuclearization talks. And Ishiba went for very generic, general things that Japan would say that he would support the full denuclearization of North Korea, whatnot. And then Trump sort of barged in and said, that's a good question. And then he started answering this. And he basically repeated that he and Kim Jong-un had such a good relationship, and he stopped war because of the good personal relationship. He would love to reach out again. He said that once again North Korea has not responded.

And then from his Shiba side, he said that the increased talks, the potential engagement will be good for the world peace basically. Now, but this comes not long after Donald Trump and also the defense secretary Pete Hegset called North Korea a nuclear power. That was very interesting and I haven't seen any follow-up to that in the Pentagon despite all the noise in DC and South Korea about this China internal, that's what this means. Okay but once again Donald Trump interested in trying to stop the war again quote unquote and to continue his relationship. But he has a lot of wars to start right now. He has a lot of wars.

Did Prime Minister Ishiba give any sign that he's in favor of this? That he's like behind restart of negotiations? His remarks were largely, I support whatever you decide to do short of tone when it comes to it, because it's like a meet and greet sort of summit this time around, but he did include the mention of the abductee issue, right? Which is the the sticking point for Japan? It doesn't seem that long ago Maybe a year ago that we were talking about rumors of a possibility of a North Korea Japan summit. Do you remember that? Yeah, and Kim Yo-jong

I read this again when I was writing the prediction piece and it's it felt like ages ago Oh my but I think it was the first quarter a few months last year. Fourth quarter? First. So really just about a year ago. Yeah about a year ago. There were rumors and exclusive media reports and then Kim Yo-jong sort of confirmed that there were backdoor discussion with Japan and then after a weeks, Kim Yo-jong sort of issued this statement saying, okay, there were discussions, but it's off the table because I can apparently see that Kishida, the prime minister at the time,

is just doing this for domestic politics because he is suffering approval rate, which was true. Approval rate side was true, but Kim Yo-jong sort of tweaked it like that and sort of embarrassed the prime minister and that sort of ended like that. Under the current prime minister, Is there any talk, are there any rumors, any murmurings about a possible summit or a visit?

No, not really. Okay, interesting. So basically, Isha is just saying to Trump, we'll support whatever you wanna do. Yeah, but include the abductee issue, basically. But include the abductee issue. Okay, all right, well that brings us I think to the end. Anything you want to leave us with? Any thoughts? This week is actually very

important. We will see whether or not the South Korean president gets ruling anytime soon or the justices will add any further trials for the martial law and the impeachment case. If impeachment actually is upheld by the constitutional court, it will have North Korea policy implications. So stay tuned. Stay tuned. All right. And happy birthday to, happy seventh birthday to the podcast. Happy birthday podcast. Thanks for coming on the show. See you again soon. Looking to stay informed about South Korea's fast-evolving political, business and cultural landscape?

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Ladies and gentlemen, that brings us to the end of our podcast episode for today. Our thanks go to Brian Betts and Alana Hill for facilitating this episode and to our post recording producer genius, Gabby Magnuson, who cuts out all the extraneous noises, awkward silences, bodily functions, and fixes the audio levels. Thank you and listen again next time.