SEOUL, South Korea – Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday gifted North Korean leader Kim Jong-un with a Russian limousine, a move that not only recalls past Soviet practice and reinforces suddenly blooming ties, but is also a massive snub to the West.
Following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russia has suffered a storm of sanctions. Moscow’s resultant isolation has led it to upgrade formerly low-profile relations with North Korea, which itself has long been sanctioned by the U.N. Security Council — a body on which Russia occupies a permanent seat.
A 2006 Security Council resolution bans the export of high-end goods — including luxury vehicles — to North Korea. Though pictorial evidence from North Korea proves that other luxury vehicles clearly have slipped through the net, Tuesday’s news seems designed by the Kremlin to send a message.
It was reported in North Korea Tuesday that Mr. Putin had sent a car to Mr. Kim as a gift. The vehicle was received by Mr. Kim’s high-profile sister, Yo Jong, and by Party Secretary Pak Jong-chon.
The gift is a “clear demonstration of the special personal relations between the two leaders,” North Korean media, monitored in Seoul, reported.
Later in the day, Russian media reported that the car was an Aurus Senat Limousine.
When Mr. Kim visited Mr. Putin at the Vostochny Cosmodrome, a satellite launch center in the Russian Far East in September 2023, the two shared the back seat of an Aurus Senat.
“When the head of [North Korea] was at the Vostochny cosmodrome, he looked at this car, Putin showed it to him personally, and like many people, Kim liked this car,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday, Reuters reported from Moscow. “North Korea is our neighbor, our close neighbor, and we intend, and will continue, to develop our relations with all neighbors, including North Korea.”
Since last year’s summit, relations have blossomed with high-level bilateral visits. North Korea has also begun to supply munitions for Russia’s offensive in Ukraine, and a visit by Mr. Putin to Pyongyang is widely anticipated.
According to specialist website autoevolution, Mr. Kim’s new limo is a “luxury sedan” priced — in its most basic version — at $245,000.
The model, which is used by Mr. Putin for official business, “has often been described as the baby of a Rolls-Royce Phantom and a Bentley Continental Flying Spur,” the site wrote — “with an engine supposedly developed with input from Bosch and Porsche.”
It is not clear how the vehicle was physically delivered.
A narrow land border, just 10.7 miles, connects North Korea with the Russian Far East. A single railway bridge, “The Friendship Bridge,” crosses the border’s Tumen River. Using the line, North Korean trains can move onto the Trans-Siberian Express, hence to Moscow — a trip made repeatedly by North Korean leaders.
The bridge, however, has no road span.
South Korean media reported that an official of Seoul’s Unification Ministry, speaking in a closed-door briefing Tuesday, accused Russia of ignoring Security Council resolutions. “Providing such an item is considered a violation of sanctions on North Korea,” the official said.
Even so, the Russian gift is hardly the first luxury vehicle to roll over Pyongyang tarmac.
A range of images taken in North Korea – such as of a senior military officer standing beside a mauve supercar – make clear that sanctioned items are entering North Korea. More recently, a chauffeured Mercedes Maybach Pullman limo has been seen in images and footage shot in North Korea, conveying to Mr. Kim.
Well before the Kim-Putin meeting last year, high-end vehicular transport had featured heavily in North Korea’s foreign engagements under Kim Jong-un.
In 2018, in Singapore, the first summit between Mr. Kim and President Donald Trump was delayed by an apparently unscripted interaction, when Mr. Trump showed the North Korean the ins and outs of his limousine, “The Beast.”
A Russian commentator offered a cynical view of Western attachment to sanctions — a pressure regimen that has not prevented North Korea from obtaining nuclear arms and ballistic-missile delivery systems.
“Sanctions are usually introduced to make sure decision makers will feel good and voters will believe something is being done on a certain issue,” said Andrei Lankov, a North Korea expert at Seoul’s Kookmin University. “The West should have learned decades ago that sanctions are not going to work unless you have absolute unity of all participating countries.”
The resurgence in Moscow-Pyongyang ties — and Tuesday’s gift — harks back to an earlier era.
“An expensive prestige limousine was presented to [North Korean state founder] Kim Il-sung,” Mr. Lankov recalled of Soviet days, when the “Zil” brand was famed across the Eastern Bloc and among the USSR’s global allies.
Whether the state founder’s grandson needs a Russian vehicle today is questionable.
“It’s a nice gesture, but [Kim Jong-un] has a good supply of European prestige cars,” Mr. Lankov said. “The elite women carry very expensive Western handbags, and the leaders are known for their habit of using high-quality Western cars — with Mercedes-Benz being the brand of choice.”
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.