President Vladimir Putin is expected to visit North Korea and Vietnam in the coming weeks according to reports confirmed in vedomosti a Russian business daily.
Russia’s Ambassador to North Korea Alexander Matsegora told the newspaper that he is “actively preparing” for the Kremlin leader’s visit to Pyongyang although he didn’t specify the date.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un invited Putin to visit his country in September as he wrapped up a rare trip to Russia’s Far East.
Moscow at the time promised to help with North Korea’s fledgling space program, while Putin told reporters he saw “possibilities” for military cooperation with Pyongyang.
Alexander Zhebin, a leading researcher at the Center for Korean Studies at the Institute of China and Modern Asia of the Russian Academy of Sciences said, “the two leaders will likely talk about restoring trade and economic ties that were maintained before the wave of sanctions from the West.”
“In particular, Putin, at a meeting with the heads of news agencies, called the restrictions on labor migrants from the DPRK strange (UN members have been prohibited from using labor migrants from North Korea since 2017 – Vedomosti).”
“The Koreans are also interested in resuming sending their workers to Russia, where they worked during Soviet times, the expert says. They are distinguished by high discipline and qualifications.”
Meanwhile, Vietnamese media previously reported that the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, Nguyen Phu Trong, invited Putin to visit the country this year. The Russian leader last traveled to the Southeast Asian country in 2017.
On May 15, Russia’s trade representative in Vietnam, Vyacheslav Kharinov, speaking at the “Modern Russia” conference, said that the most pressing issue in trade and economic cooperation is banking support for mutual settlements between counterparties from these two countries.
As Kharinov noted, now the main instrument for making payments is the Vietnamese-Russian Joint Bank, which managed to establish a payment system in national currencies.
One of the additional reliable methods of mutual settlements, in his opinion, could be Vietnam’s participation in the work of the Russian Faster Payments System, and they have already considered the possibility of connecting to it, but this has not happened yet.
Since assuming his fifth term as president in early May, Putin has made trips to China, Belarus and Uzbekistan.
On June 6, assistant to the Russian President Yuri Ushakov said in an interview with Pavel Zarubin that Putin would attend the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Astana on July 3-4, and it was too early to talk about other visits, but they “will definitely happen.”
