North Korea News Podcast by NK News - Predicting 2025: What’s in store for North Korea in the year to come

Episode Date: January 16, 2025

In this special roundtable episode, NK News journalists evaluate the accuracy of their predictions for 2024 and share what they expect from North Korea in the year to come. The team discusses how the DPRK’s relations with South Korea, China and Russia have evolved and allegations that Seoul sought to provoke Pyongyang last year. They […]

You're listening to an exclusive episode of the NK News podcast available only to subscribers. You can listen to this and other episodes from your preferred podcast player by accessing the Private Podcast feed. For more detailed instructions, please see the step-by-step guide on the NK News podcast. I'm your host, Jaco Zwetsut and today we are having a special predictions episode. I'm joined here in the studio by Shreyas Reddy. Happy to be here, Jaco. Anton Tokolin.

Hey all. And Jongmin Kim. Happy New Year. Indeed, a happy new year. Happy New Year to all of us. And let's hope it's a, it remains peaceful on the Korean Peninsula as last year did. Tense but peaceful. So let's talk about what are the predictions you made for last year for 2024 and how accurate

whether which of those came true, which of those didn't come true. Jongmin, let's start with you. Well, in 2024, it actuallyorea beat it started off with a bombshell announcement from Kim Jong-un about ditching unification basically. So my prediction was based on that and also Yoon Seok-yoon, South Korean president with full authority at the time, not anymore. For our listeners who may not be aware, although they will be by the time the podcast comes out, he was arrested today.

This morning, finally, after a weeks long confrontation with the investigators. But anyways, in 2024, when we kicked off, I saw that Yoon's rhetoric has been escalating when it comes to, you know, North Korea threat and North Korean human rights issues and so on and so forth. So my prediction basically was that there would be some sort of clash along the border, especially with North Korea announcing that they will, you know, make it physically apparent that the two Koreas are separate states at war. And South Korean side also making a lot of escalatory moves. And it seemed like a very plausible prediction to me at the time

Right, so at the time I said on land and in the air and at sea there would be separate types of potential clashes especially at the sea, my main prediction was that at the NLL, the de facto maritime border in North Korea might be forward deploying their navy to claim territory and so on and so forth. But I did say that in the air there would be potential drone incursion again. But my prediction was North Korea will send drones to South Korea. But looking back, that's not true because it turns out South Korea sent drones to North Korea, which we belatedly

found out just a few weeks ago. South Korea, the government and the military are still not claiming responsibility for that. Not the JCS. JCS is kind of, they're saying that they are not responsible, but defense ministry did confirm, right? It's been kind of interesting in that they haven't kind of officially confirmed the drone situation as such,

the drone incursions, or at least their part in it. What they have tried to do is insist that whatever operations may or may not have been carried out, they did not have any intent to provoke North Korea, they haven't been trying to focus on that aspect of it. But essentially, we've seen a lot of different statements coming out from different sides that at least seem to indicate there was some sort of operation. It's just a short shot of an official acceptance.

It's kind of more like a neither confirm nor deny situation at the top most levels. Okay, but I want to go back to to checking testing your prediction. So your ones about incursions and possible sea battles that nothing of that matter took place. Right. So there was no like actual clashes between the two. But the part that we mentioned during the NK Pro prediction event was actually on the land. I did predict that there would be some sort of casualty alongside the border because of the clash, but that was partly wrong and partly right because someone did die. Several people died, but it wasn't because of the clash, but because North Koreans were installing and of the clash, but because North Koreans were installing and demining, getting rid of mines as they were building walls at the DMZ, and some soldiers died because of their own mine

explosion. North Korean soldiers. North Korean soldiers. And there were some soldiers who died because of construction amid extensive heat during summer. Right. So we do actually have a physical sign of the border between the two Koreas. Now, built by North Korea, but those that died were North Koreans.

Yes. All right. Anton, what did you predict and how did you go with that? All right, so last year there was a whole bundle of predictions actually, but the central one was that the UN panel of experts was supposed to die. And it did. Basically, after 15 years of monitoring sanctions and providing extensive reports on sanctions violations, it kicked the bucket. And yeah. With retrospect, was that something that we all saw coming? I mean, was it a predictable prediction? Of course there were writings on the wall. So it was coming. We kind of knew that at some point Russia and well, we thought it would be either Russia

and China together, one of them, who'd veto the extension of the panel's mandate. And that's what happened when Russia finally sealed the deal and basically blocked the extension of its mandate. It resulted basically in this gap right now in sanctions monitoring efforts that were partially alleviated. I mean the gap was partially fixed but we probably want to talk about it a bit later. Yes, yes. So that's a clear win for you in terms of the predictions. Is there anything that you predicted last year that definitely didn't come to pass? Well, obviously, when we were talking about this situation, we were also including China, right? But as we as this past year has shown, basically, China stayed out of it. There was

not much participation on China's part. And we cannot definitively say whether China condones it or is very against the situation, but definitely it tried to stay out of it. Maybe there was tacit approval. There's different theories whether China disapproves this kind of cooperation between North Korea and Russia. But the fact remains that my prediction did count on China a lot. And it didn't come to pass. It's hard to remember anything notable that China did last year vis-a-vis North Korea, right? Either in terms of action or in

terms of dialogue or engagement. Honestly, there were only few diplomatic visits and exchanges between North Korea and China. Last year, there wasn't many activities. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that was supposed to be the China-DPRK friendship here. And it was only a few, very few exchanges that year. At the same time, Russia, North Korea exchanges just skyrocketed. Yeah, I thought for sure that Xi Jinping would maybe invite him to come and visit him or would visit him himself in Pyongyang.

Neither of those things happened. So yeah, interesting. All right, Shreyas, turning to you, what did you predict last year and how did you go? What was your scorecard? Well, it was, so my areas were mostly technical. So I was working on aerospace and cyber related predictions. Always challenging area to predict in some ways, not because North Korea does anything particularly extraordinary, but because they frankly mostly tend to follow routine processes. So with this exercise, we were trying to look at going beyond just repeating what North Korea already announced.

So with cybersecurity, we made a prediction that North Korea, which has a long history of stealing sensitive data, defense-related data, would hit the jackpot by finding a vulnerability in US defense networks and stealing classified information from defense companies, government agencies, including possibly missile data. And now we don't know of any specific cases of that happening this year, but the... When you say this year, you mean in 2024? So yeah, in 2024, so last year.

But in July, the US did release, essentially they issued a bounty on North Korean hacker and issued advisories in which they attributed attacks on cyber attacks on NASA as well as defense companies, defense departments to North Korean threat group Andario. And so in a sense... Do you know what the size of the bounty is? Ten million dollars. You know when I was a child a bounty was a chocolate bar with coconut inside. Well in in some parts of the world, that's still very much the case. I do like a bounty, but I'd rather have $10 million.

So if you can tell me where these people are. Well, I think if I knew, then I'd probably go and tell the US government myself. Well, yeah, they've essentially issued a wanted notice for this particular hacker as well. Now, so essentially, I would say it wasn't a completely accurate prediction, but there's a basis for it and certainly does reflect North Korea has continued making these sorts of attempts, these efforts to infiltrate US networks, not just through the cyber criminals, but also through remote IT workers who have tried to, for example, some of them attempted to infiltrate one department under the

Department of Homeland Security. Didn't quite work out, but sure they've tried elsewhere. The aerospace front, perhaps that was a particularly bold prediction from our side. What was it? So it was that North Korea, everyone knows about their ongoing nuclear development. Sure. But most of their nuclear development has been focused on their army and to some extent, their navy. The Air Force, which is essentially made up of Soviet-era aircraft, has long been neglected and the prediction was that as they continued their nuclear development, which

Kim Jong-un highlighted as a key priority last year, one of the nuclear missiles that they would attempt to develop or at least work toward would be aimed at Air Force equipment, so aerial deployment. And obviously that would not be something that would happen immediately, but it would at least be a step toward that direction. Now frankly, North Korea has not been known to prioritize its Air Force anyway, particularly in recent years. Except on parade days. Well, those are essentially just there as an opportunity to display that those aircraft

are still flying. Yeah. Which honestly most of them- Or rolling. Yeah, exactly that too. Most of them are decades old. Some of them are essentially Korean warrior aircraft that are just there for displays at this stage.

So yeah, probably it was a little unlikely to begin with, but who knows, maybe at some stage North Korea could go in that direction. They've certainly taken a step in a different direction by expanding their drone fleet. So going with combat and reconnaissance drones, that's not necessarily going to be nuclear capable, but at the very least, they haven't completely abandoned the idea of aerial supremacy. If you're already a subscriber to NK News, you can listen to full episodes from your preferred podcast player by accessing the Private Podcast Feed. For more detailed instructions, please see the step-by-step guide on the NK News website at nknews.org slash private dash feed.