Boot on the Other Foot: Putin Scuttles to Pyongyang as Desperation Grows

In April 1950, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin gave his blessing to North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung to invade his southern neighbour. On the 25^th June, Kim’s forces flooded across the 38^th Parallel, beginning the Korean War. Having calculated that the United States and its allies would be too weary and disinterested to fight another Asian war, Stalin was surprised when a UN Security Council resolution (passed during the Soviet boycott) prompted an international response. When a ceasefire was declared in July 1953, some 3 million people lay dead, mostly civilians. No territorial changes had occurred, and no peace treaty was signed.

Source: ARSOF History

Like much of the early Cold War, Stalin and the Soviets played a key role in orchestrating events, even if they did not commit ground troops to the war in Korea. Instead, they encouraged the involvement of Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA), itself battered after years of civil war. Mao was happy to sacrifice Chinese troops in support of his communist overlord, the Sino-Soviet split still being more than a decade away.

There was more than a hint of irony this week when Vladimir Putin travelled to Pyongyang to meet the current North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un. Having not visited the pariah state since the early days of his presidency in 2000, Putin would surely not have done so now had it not been for his war in Ukraine and Russia’s increasingly isolated international position. Signing a pact with Kim that will ‘protect us both from aggression’, Putin’s visit is a sign of desperation and weakness. Joseph Stalin never went to Pyongyang, nor Beijing for that matter. People came to him, in his intimidating Kremlin lair. Despite Putin voicing hopes that his next meeting with Kim will be in Moscow, the North Korean leader will hardly feel compelled to comply.

Dictator bromance: Kim and Putin meet in Pyongyang. Source: CBS News

Exactly what has been agreed and promised between Putin and Kim will remain a closely guarded secret. Yet, it appears clear that Pyongyang is selling the Russians millions of artillery shells for use in Ukraine, perhaps in return for sophisticated nuclear submarine and missile technology. After their meeting in Vladivostok last September, there has been evidence that North Korean munitions are being used in the Ukraine war. Kim will exact a high price for this precious offering of war materiel, which he knows Putin is in desperate need of. Whilst it might not be in Moscow’s interest to have an increasingly powerful nuclear dictatorship on its border, Putin seems willing to do almost anything to ensure the signature play of his rule succeeds.

At the start of this year, Kim made a significant change to North Korea’s historical position re: the South. Whilst his father, Kim Jong-Il, and grandfather, Kim Il-Sung, had always vowed to unify Korea under communist rule, Kim junior has now declared South Korea its ‘principal enemy’ and abandoned the policy of unification. Recent incursions by North Korean troops across the demilitarized zone (DMZ) into the South have followed other provocative acts such as shelling South Korean waters and sending bags of human waste attached to ballons over the border.

A North Korean ‘waste balloon’ lands in a South Korea field. Source: DW

With North Korea continuing its unrelenting pursuit of nuclear build-up at the expense of its population’s well-being, the potential for a conflagration on the Korean Peninsula grows. Like Putin, Kim appears to realise his own mortality. There is perhaps nothing so dangerous as a dictator with nothing to lose, with both leaders having demonstrated their disregard for human life, friend or foe.

Hope rests in China. Although Xi Jinping has shown himself to be a revisionist leader with grand ambitions for regional and global Chinese supremacy, Beijing has always feared the destabilising presence of North Korea. Traditionally Pyongyang’s staunchest ally, China has typically been able to exert its influence to rein the Kims in when needed. Russia’s reliance on China for material support means that Putin would had to have consulted Xi before travelling to North Korea. Again, the boot is on the other foot compared to the Cold War. It is Moscow that must heed Beijing’s call, not vice versa.

Kim Il-Sung speaks in front of a portrait of Joseph Stalin. Source: Reddit

Whether Xi can soothe the malign intentions of his foreign underlings remains to be seen. He has displayed a ruthlessness comparable to Stalin in purging his domestic enemies. Now he must show similar strength in controlling troublesome allies, for the sake of China and the wider world.

Crimea Bridge Incident Riles Putin: a Reminder of Russia’s Historic and Present Vulnerability

Russia has launched a series of indiscriminate attacks across Ukraine, including the first direct targeting of Kyiv for several months. It follows an explosion on a key bridge linking the seized Crimean Peninsula with mainland Russia, an event President Vladimir Putin has blamed on Ukrainian ‘terrorists’. At least 14 people have been killed in the Russian attacks.

Central Kyiv was targeted after 83 Russian missiles were fired into Ukraine. Source: BBC

Opened in 2018 – 4 years after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea – the bridge crosses the Kerch Strait, connecting Crimea with the Krasnodar Krai region in Russia’s North Caucuses. It has been critical for moving supplies, ammunition and military personnel from Russia into southern Ukraine. Not only is the bridge of strategic and symbolic importance, but it also helps plug a gap between the Black Sea and the Sea Azov, the latter giving access to interior Russia.

Prior to the Russian annexation of 2014, Crimea was probably best known for the Yalta Conference held by the ‘Big Three’ of Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt in February 1945 or, even more famously, the Crimean War of 1853-1856.

Fought between Russia and an Anglo-French alliance in support of the Ottoman Empire, the Crimean War was the first to receive almost instantaneous mass media attention, with reports from the front communicated via telegraph and published in newspapers, with evocative use made of the new medium of photography. Railways, ironclad warships and naval shells were just some of the other inventions of modern warfare debuting in Crimea.

After Russian advances in the Balkans were repulsed by stout Ottoman defence in 1853, Anglo-French naval forces entered the Black Sea at the beginning of 1854. They defeated the Russians at the Battle of the Alma, before indecisive encounters at Balaklava and Inkerman. The Russians were eventually forced to retreat to the fortress of Sevastopol, which the Allies laid siege to during 11 months of bitter fighting (October 1854-September 1855), compounded by awful weather and rampant disease.

Nothing typified the outdated tactics of the Crimean War than the ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ at Balaklava. Source: Historic UK

Modern warfare was not for the feint-hearted:

Now, if you have strong nerves, go through the doorway on the left: that is the room in which wounds are bandaged and operations performed. There you will see surgeons with pale, gloomy physiognomies, their arms soaked in blood up to the elbows, deep in concentration over a bed on which a wounded man is lying under the influence of chloroform, open-eyed as in a delirium, and uttering meaningless words which are occasionally simple and affecting. The surgeons are going about the repugnant but beneficial task of amputation. You will see the sharp, curved knife enter the white, healthy body; you will see the wounded man suddenly regain consciousness with a terrible, harrowing shrieked cursing; you will see the apothecary assistant fling the severed arm into a corner; you will see another wounded man who is lying on a stretcher in the same room and watching the operation on his companion, writhing and groaning less with physical pain than with the psychological agony of apprehension; you will witness fearsome sights that will shake you to the roots of your being; you will see war not as beautiful, orderly and gleaming formation, with music and beaten drums, streaming banners and generals on prancing horses, but war in its authentic expression – as blood, suffering and death (Tolstoy, pp. 191-2).

British soldiers of the Crimean War who have lost limbs. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Americans would find out less than a decade later that battle tactics had not kept pace with the technology of war. The resulting carnage was unimaginable.

As Tolstoy and thousands of others awaited death at Sevastopol, in May 1855 the Allies set their sights on Kerch. 60 ships carrying some 15,000 troops landed at this easternmost settlement of the Crimea, in a bid to open a new front against Russia and disrupt its supply lines. Anglo-French ships proceeded through the Kerch Strait into the Sea of Azov, wreaking havoc with Russia’s logistics and destroying a major military depot at the strategic hub of Taganrog in June. Dozens of other coastal fortifications and bases were razed.

Troops landing at Kerch during the Crimean War. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Attacked from all sides, and with the motherland now under threat, the Russian resistance at Sevastopol gradually weakened until a decisive French attack at Fort Malakoff in September 1855 broke the siege in the Allies’ favour. Russia limped on until March 1856 when Moscow sued for an ultimately unfavourable peace.

The strategic and military significance of Crimea, jutting out as it does into the heart of the Black Sea, makes it a Russian obsession. That it has been the object of national humiliation, whether through defeat in the Crimean War or through its incorporation into an independent Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union, seems only to strengthen Putin’s determination to maintain and strengthen the peninsula after it was ‘reclaimed’ in 2014.

Any vulnerability triggers immediate concern and paranoia within an already-paranoid Kremlin. Putin’s reaction to the weekend’s bridge incident is a case in point. As his reckless war goes from bad to worse, he foresees the loss of this great ‘Russian’ asset that he so gloriously seized back. As Kyiv continues to make gains in Ukraine’s southeast, hopes have been raised that Crimea too can be liberated. The Kerch Strait is not only a vital throughway for Russia but Ukraine too. Since its loss of Crimea, the port city of Mariupol (itself under Russian occupation) is cut off from the Black Sea, with the Strait acting as a Russian chokepoint to dictate the flow of ships and supplies.

The Kerch Strait connects the Sea Azov with the Black Sea. Source: Google Earth

The focus of the Ukraine War in recent months has been on the oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk, of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, all illegally annexed by Russia, with sham referendums to boot. Do not be surprised to see Crimea, until recently a seemingly unobtainable target for Kyiv, return towards the top of the agenda. For Putin and Russia, a repeat of the 1850s disaster is not inconceivable given how the war has been managed to date.

Yet beware the cornered tiger. With his nuclear sabre-rattling becoming louder in recent weeks, there is little hope that Putin will concede defeat without resort to mass destruction, slim prospects of his immediate ouster. The Crimean War helped set the scene for the Tsarist decline that ended in the Bolshevik’s successful revolution of 1917. Where will Putin’s devastating Ukrainian venture lead Russia, and the rest of Europe, in the coming years?

Additional Source

Tolstoy, L. The Cossacks and Other Stories (2006)