North Korea News Podcast by NK News - Russia-DPRK bridge update, trilateral boat tours and Moscow-Pyongyang flights

Episode Date: August 5, 2025

On this week’s episode, NK News Data Analyst Anton Sokolin unpacks major construction updates on the Russia–DPRK car bridge project near the Tumen River.  He also breaks down the ambitious trilateral initiative to launch historical boat tours connecting China, Russia and North Korea along the same river as well as new direct flights between Moscow […]

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briefings, monthly reports and forecasts, networking receptions and event opportunities, as well as much, much more. To find the best fit for you, just head to signup.careerpro.org and become a member today. Hello listeners and welcome to the NK News Podcast. I'm your host, Jaco Zwetslu, and today it is Tuesday, the 5th of August 2025, and I'm joined here in the studio by Anton Soklin. Anton, welcome back. Hey, Jacko. How are you? I'm excited. We've got so many stories to cover today. Let us... Excuse me. I'm so excited. I have a frog in my throat. Pardon me to listen then to our producer. Let us start with the news.

We know that years ago, the Chinese built this new bridge on their side of the border over to North Korea but the new friendship bridge or whatever it's called it's not really been fully in operation yet but it's there now the Russians have restarted an old project on their side of the water near Tumen. Right so there is actually a couple of updates on that front as you as you mentioned there's two major bridges connecting North Korea to China, for example. So one in the west, that would be the new yellow bridge that's been constructed but hasn't been opened yet. That's the one.

And the other one would be the Tumen Bridge. And that's probably what we are going to talk about now. So basically, the North Koreans and Chinese, they build this bridge from 2015 to 2019, something like this, up until the pandemic. And then the pandemic hit, basically they finished the bridge, they had appeared the Brady, but it didn't become fully operational. And right now what we are seeing is that on the Chinese side of that bridge, the Chinese authorities are building a huge, either customs complex or like a trade facility So it means basically in the sign of preparation for rebounding trade. So that's what we are observing right now

It's a notable development because so far this bridge has been visited only by tourists Who would come there take a selfie? It was just a landmark, but now it will actually have a practical purpose Okay, you'll have to confuse one area of confusion for me. So this is a Chinese bridge or is it a Russian bridge? Oh, we are talking about the Chinese one and then I'm going to skip over to the Chinese, the Russian one. Okay. That's why I was confused.

All right. So there are two. Yeah. Yeah. Because, yeah, so we are starting with the Tumen river, but, but, but because it's all in the same area, it's all around the same Tumen river. Right. So now we're going down south a little bit, about 200 kilometers. Okay. So it's a in the same area, it's all along the same Tumen River, right? So now we're going down south a little bit, to about 200 kilometers.

Okay, so it's a fair drive. It's a fair drive, it's not that far. Of course, if you draw a straight line, it would be a little bit shorter, but because of the river curves, well, of course. So we go down 200 kilometers and we find another bridge, right? So it's a Russian railway bridge, and right next to it, the Russians and the North Koreans are trying to build a car bridge, so a vehicle motorway bridge.

Okay. And yeah, so the bridge came as a result of a meeting between Kim Jong-un and Putin last year. They agreed to construct it, and it's been in the works, well, not in the works. They've been discussing the construction for very long, since probably the 90s, maybe even before that. Because it turns out that Russia has so many... it shares its borders with so many countries, right? But North Korea is the only country with which it doesn't have a motorway bridge.

So, well, apparently to boost trade or whatever connectivity there is, they decided to do it. And what we're seeing right now is that both sides have entered some serious preparation stage, because for example, we can see that the North Koreans are already building a large customs complex on their side of the river. There is already photos posted by Chinese tourists, suggest that there is already walls in place, there is already like the first floor probably, at least the foundations and stuff. So it's

ongoing and the Russian side, they are also planning to build a large customs complex. It's going to cost around $40 million and the bridge itself is going to cost about $110 million. And how long will it take? So they want to finish it before 2026. Oh that's really quick. Before the end of 2026, sorry. Oh before the end of 2026. Yeah, December 2026 at the latest. Didn't we a few months ago talk about the suicide of a Russian official who was involved in this project or am I getting it right?

Yes, so of course the Russian Transport minister, Starovoy, so yes indeed he either committed suicide or they made him disappear, I don't know what exactly happened, but the fact remains that the person killed himself and he was overseeing this construction. He was overseeing. Yeah, because it was under his purview, right? He was the transportation minister and right now there is a new minister, but nevertheless we are seeing some signs that at least the Russians are pushing forward with the actual

construction of the bridge not the facilities adjacent to it but the actual bridge because we've observed dredging dredger or some workboat consistently stationed in the area where the bridge is supposed to be located and now some sort of platform appeared near there so my guess would be that it's either made of sand or silt dredged up from the from the bottom of the river bed and usually when they want to put a column there they kind of wall off the certain platform dredge up whatever silt sand there is fill it up create a solid foundation for it in the water and then put a concrete column in between in the middle. And well, usually it's done by this drilling barge. So

since we have observed the signs of this kind of work going on and since this platform appeared, we can say that probably Russia has made an actual first tangible step towards building the actual bridge over there. Let's see if it finishes then if it opens. All right, okay, so our next story Anton, boat tourism. Right, so it's about the same river essentially, right? The Tumen river, yeah. So, well, we know that there is a bridge, right? So there is a rail bridge connecting Russia and North Korea. There is also a bridge connecting, of course, North Korea and China up the river. And, well, at this point, the three, North Korea and China up the river.

And well, at this point, the three countries, at least China and Russia, are discussing this plan to launch boat tours along the river for Russian tourists, for Chinese tourists, whatever tourist. And they all, it's all supposed to happen under the banner of a red tourism. So I didn't know about it, but maybe our listeners do. In China, it's a huge thing, apparently a red tourism. So I didn't know about it, but maybe our listeners do. In China, it's a huge thing, apparently, red tourism. It means visiting sort of sites of historical importance for the party or for communist party, I mean,

the military or some ancestral places of worship, basically, veterans, et cetera. So maybe visiting some memorials of fallen soldiers and certain who lost their lives in certain battles against, I don't know, bourgeoisie or whatever forces there were, Japanese maybe. And well, since the Soviet Union had a fair share of soldiers fighting in the area,

there are remains of these soldiers scattered around the Tumen River as well, near Hassan, Lake Hassan, and near the, basically the other side of the Tumen river as well, near Hassan, the Lake Hassan, and near the, basically the other side of the Tumen river across from Tumengan. And now they're planning to launch these tours to visit these places by boats, and you're supposed to take a boat in China, go down the river, and well, they envision it

as that you can hop off in North Korea and China and Russia visit all three countries and eventually somehow also that is a very ambitious part of the plan but still they want to take these boats all the way to Vladivostok so you enter the actual Sea of Japan or East Sea and you go to Vladivostok. Well, of course, we can see that the number of problem arises. The picture in the article shows that it's a long boat journey of several hundred kilometers. So this is not like the kind of we're used to seeing over the last 25 years, short distance Chinese boat tourism, mainly on the Yalu River, where people would hop on a boat in Dandong and come close to Shenzhou and sort of look over into North Korea. That's a very short, you know, half an hour, one hour, maybe two

hour boat tours. But this is really trying to get all the way out there to Vladivostok and then into the Sea of Japan, East Sea perhaps. So it's a lot more ambitious and it involves trilateral cooperation because the Chinese and the Russians, they can talk about doing it by themselves, but at the end they're gonna have to get DPRK cooperation to make it work, right? Exactly, and China has been operating smaller boats, smaller tour boats around the area.

Usually it's just really tiny boat with maybe a capacity of 10 people, and they would just go around the area, but because the border area is so, well, it's so tiny, it's a a tiny spot the issues of border delineation and how we will control the traffic and how do you actually make this whole thing happen or this kind of issues arise and naturally of course if you want to launch such boats all the way to the Sea of Japan it's an open sea right so you need to have

actually seaworthy boats and And that raises another question. How tall these boats are going to be? Because the bridge, there is one bridge already there, right? The rail bridge. And then there is also the future car bridge. And they are that actually they don't have that such high clearance there. Now in Holland, they have a lot of bridges that open for tall ships. I don't know how they're going to build this one here across the… That one is not supposed to be that kind of bridge. And well, even if, then it means you need to reconstruct the other existing rail bridge.

So it adds only more complexity to the task. So well, we'll see how it pans out. And bigger boats generally, they sit lower in the water, which could mean a lot of dredging. And the story that you've written there mentions 200 kilometers of dredging in that river, which will need again a lot of trilateral cooperation. Not only dredging, also you need to reinforce the embankment. Because if you even dredge it, the river is filled with sand. So it means that if you dredge it, well, sand will appear there again,

and it will only complicate things further. So you need to if you dredge it, well, sand will appear there again and it will only complicate things further. So you need to also reinforce the shores, right? And if you don't do that, it's a futile attempt. And I've just thought of something different there that, correct me if I'm wrong, but the Tumen River freezes in winter, right? Some part of it. Some parts, right. And so some people, some North, cross the border at those frozen points during the winter. If that river becomes dredged and the banks are short up,

that might change how it freezes, whether it freezes, how deeply it freezes, and whether people can cross the border in the winter. Well, that's a good question. Well, I think the security that they have in place there is pretty strong, actually. So to reach the actual river, it's that easy. There's fences and everything so guard posts are stations there so it's not very simple. I don't know how it works right now but maybe back in the 90s like when we heard those famous stories how people actually cross the river right maybe early 2000s. But it's one more obstacle. Yeah, but now it's a bit more complicated.

Okay. So, Russia is now, Russian airline is flying direct routes from Moscow to Pyongyang, first time in a long time. Right. That's an interesting development because it's been decades since they operated such a direct flight from one capital to another. The problem with these flights is that, well, they say that right now they're in this stage where they're trying to figure out whether there's going to be enough demand, whether they can fill the plane and get enough seats filled. Yes, weekly or daily. It's a monthly flight, so far now it's just once a month. And well, even though they opened it,

they started a sale, the ticket sale and you could actually go to their website and try to check like the dates and buy the ticket. The problem was that it wasn't really available to regular citizens. So far we only know that Russian officials and diplomats flew the flight on the way to Pyongyang and on the way back. Well, actually some North Koreans also flew from Russia. At least the footage that I've seen published by Russian state media did not show

that the plane was fully filled. So it raised certain suspicions whether they actually can operate at this rate. And though there were some North Koreans who traveled to Russia probably for work, some of them even gave a brief interviews to the Russian state media saying that there was one woman who spoke a flawless Russian. She just said that like, Oh, I was here for two weeks in Moscow for work, whatever, what

work she didn't explain. But anyway, so we can expect that there is, there is going to be some kind of traffic, there is going to be some demand, but I suspect this demand will be mostly coming from North Korea to shuttle whatever people, like it could be officials, it could be diplomats, it could be businessmen, it could be workers, because this particular plane is said to be able to seat over 400 people. Oh, that's quite large. So that's a lot. And yeah.

Now, very briefly on a related but separate note, a Russian military aircraft flew in and out of North Korea's capital very quickly last Sunday. Yeah, another aviation update. Basically, it's a continuation of the trend that we have seen over the past two years since 2023. Russia does fly lots of military, well, they are passenger airplanes, but they are operated by the Russian Air Force. And we don't know what purpose they fly there for. It could be pretty much from anything. Could be anything, for example, it could be like we've seen this Kim Jong-un right morning, the caskets of presumably dead soldiers, North Korean soldiers. It could be that. It could be delivering some sensitive military material,

for example, equipment, right? It could be that. It could be also shuttling troops. And I don't rule out that it's also used for other purposes, like moving some sort of sensitive material like for example recently we found that russia was planning at least to shuttle a radioactive material what was that i forgot what it was called cobalt 60 okay cobalt 60 from russia to north korea so it could be used for a variety of purposes. Pick whatever you like.

We don't know. No one discloses this information and probably we will never know. And for our last story, a little bit of fun here, a diplomatic, awkward, but comical moment there at the Chinese embassy in Moscow last month. You found some photographs. Tell us about that. Right. It almost sounds like your classic joke, right? US, South Korean, and North Korean military attachés walk into a Chinese embassy. And there we go. Well, unlike this classic joke, this one doesn't really have a punchline there because basically we know just a few South Korean, North Korean, and American military diplomats, right, just had fun at the Chinese embassy.

When you say military diplomats, for our listeners, that's usually like the defense attache to an embassy. Defense attache. So from the American side, there were three. There was a defense, there was the defense attache to Russia. There was a naval attache and one of their aides. As for the North Koreans, it was just two North Korean diplomats. One is the attache and the other one is the deputy attache, can I call him like that?

And from the South Korean side, well, we only identified one of them. It was a naval attache. And they were there in the photograph on stage together? Yes. So they took a group photo and well, it's kind of like almost like find Waldo. You can see the North Korean diplomat just lurking behind the South Korean one and you can see only the top of the head of the American guy in the other corner. So we cannot really say that they were mingling together.

Yes, we don't know whether they had a conversation or not. And I've been in some of these events here in South Korea. I remember there was an Arab Gulf state country a few months ago that had a big national day reception and they were in their military, you know, their special uniforms there, their dress uniforms. There were people there from America, from Russia, from Belarus, from different countries. Some of them went to the stage for the photograph together, some of them conspicuously did not. So it doesn't mean that they're all standing around talking to each other. For sure. And they were kind of scattered around the did not so it doesn't mean that they're all standing around talking to each other for sure and they were kind of scattered around the stage so it didn't really mean that they had any meaningful

conversation there of course we can't rule out like exchange of some politeness like some some I don't know excuse me sorry can I some like that we can't rule it out but it's not a forum for any negotiation or backchanneling. And well, it was an event at the Chinese embassy, right? So China was celebrating the 98th anniversary of the founding of its armed forces, the Liberation Army. And at the same time, they also had a mini gallery there dedicated to the 80th anniversary of China's resistance to the Japanese occupiers. Because China and Russia, they both celebrate their participation in World War II.

China, of course, celebrates its part fighting the Japanese. Russia, both China, Germany and Japan. And because this week marks these kind of occasions, we've also seen another event at the Chinese and Russian embassies in Pyongyang, where Chinese and Russian diplomats also jointly celebrated these sort of ties. We know that Vladimir Putin is supposed to be meeting Xi Jinping around the date. I think it's September because that's where Russia and China celebrate kind of the end of World War II, as we know it, where the war actually ended on both theaters, the European and the Asia Pacific theater.

So it has some symbolic importance for both countries. And because of this round, like, you know, 80th anniversary, right, so it's a big date. Two countries are having this kind of diplomatic exchanges. So it's an interesting development. Although one actually interesting spot that Dae-Win, who covered this story, pointed out, it didn't really feature North Koreans in those events in Pyongyang. And that was interesting because they did talk about cooperation with North Korea at the event. Oh, okay. Interesting. All right. Well, that's a great place to end there. Thank you very much, Anton, for coming on the show. We'll see you again soon.

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Again, that's shop.nknews.org. 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. you