Pyongyang-Moscow Ties Are a Force Multiplier to Pyongyang-Beijing Relations
Many experts believe that North Korea’s improving ties with Russia have weakened the North Korea–China relationship. Circumstantial evidence and one-dimensional analysis of political developments between Pyongyang and Beijing and ongoing Pyongyang-Moscow cooperation often result in this view. However, examining these three countries’ dynamics merely through the lens of current events without considering their historical backgrounds or the driving forces behind the changes in the strategic landscape poses clear analytical limitations. In particular, the North Korea-Russia Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership signed in June 2024, while solidifying their alliance, does not explain everything. To do so would be a fundamental misunderstanding of this triangular relationship.
North Korea’s strengthening ties with Russia should be viewed within the China-North Korea-Russia triangle, where China plays the central actor. It is important to note that both North Korea and Russia are heavily dependent on China and their bilateral relationship is shaped by their respective ties to China, not the other way around. Furthermore, it would be logical to assume that China and Russia coordinated their policy toward North Korea in advance. Their joint actions, such as dissolving the UN Panel of Experts on North Korea, reflect a shift toward supporting North Korea’s “legitimate security concerns” and away from denuclearization. In short, China remains the strategic constant in Northeast Asia’s security architecture, with North Korea-Russia relations fluctuating in response to China’s position.
Three Analytic Traps
The notion that a strengthened North Korea–Russia relationship comes at the expense of the North Korea–China relationship is often seen as a natural outcome of the relative nature of a triangular relationship: As one side draws closer, the other grows distant. However, this thinking is flawed for three reasons.
First, it risks falling into a zero-sum fallacy. Giving too much weight to fragmentary or transient incidents is another risk. North Korea and Russia had numerous high-level summits and interactions in 2023 and 2024. China sent lower-ranking officials to North Korea’s national ceremonies, unlike Russia. An assessment of North Korea-China political and diplomatic exchanges over the years, however, shows that this imbalance is not unusual.
Second, it ignores the primary actor in the trilateral relationship: China. China remains the center of North Korea–China–Russia ties due to the other two countries’ dependence on Beijing. North Korea’s and Russia’s alignment with China, therefore, shapes their bilateral relationship with each other. China would be isolated and North Korea and Russia would naturally grow closer if China and Russia had antagonistic relations. The logic is “the enemy of my friend is my enemy.” This logic gives North Korea, which depends on both China and Russia, two strategic options. One is to leverage China-Russia rivalry—in short, a “divide and rule” strategy. This is illustrated by North Korea’s forging of alliance treaties with both countries in 1961. The other option is for North Korea to maximize its strategic interests when China and Russia cooperate. This is a reason all three countries can now sign alliance-like treaties.
Finally, many have neglected the reality that China and Russia—North Korea’s patron states—have coordinated their policies in advance. This shift became obvious in 2023, when both countries changed their position on North Korea’s denuclearization. The China-Russia joint statements in 2024 and 2025 only reinforced this trend (this is discussed in greater detail in the “Pre-Coordination Between China and Russia” section below).
Why We Were Misled
Many experts believe that burgeoning Pyongyang–Moscow relations—as exemplified by a series of high-level meetings that included Putin’s visit to Pyongyang and Kim’s trip to the Russian Far East in September 2023 and Putin’s reciprocal visit to Pyongyang in June 2024—have led to a cooling of Pyongyang-China relations. In the lead-up to and following Vladimir Putin’s visit to North Korea in 2024, his first in 24 years, a parade of senior Russian officials visited Pyongyang, to include the defense minister (July 2023 and September 2024) and the foreign minister (October 2023).
This stood in stark contrast to the lack of high-level exchanges between North Korea and China during the same period. For example, China sent Li Hongzhong, the vice chairman of the National People’s Congress and member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Politburo, as the head of its delegation to Pyongyang’s Victory Day celebrations in July 2023. Li was significantly lower in rank than the head of Russia’s delegation, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. Li, presumably ranked 24th or 25th among China’s 25 Politburo members, was notably lower-level than Chinese Vice President Li Yuanchao (ranked eighth in the leadership hierarchy), who attended North Korea’s Victory Day in 2013. Furthermore, China sent Vice Premier and Politburo member Liu Guozhong to North Korea’s National Day celebrations in September 2023. He was much lower in ranking than Zhou Yongkang (ranked ninth in the Chinese leadership hierarchy) and Li Zhanshu (ranked third), who attended the same event in 2010 and 2018, respectively.
However, China’s US policy, rather than its policy toward North Korea, appears to have been the greater factor for these lower-level visits. China has been under growing pressure from Washington regarding North Korea’s military support for Russia since 2023, when the two countries started to hold regular minister-level talks. Improvement of relations with the United States has been Beijing’s top foreign policy priority since then, and it has had to balance demands from both Washington and Pyongyang. China’s abstention from, rather than veto of, the vote on renewing the UN Panel of Experts on North Korea in March 2024 should be understood in the same context.
Moreover, recent developments between China and North Korea should be viewed within a broader historical context. Putin’s visit to Pyongyang in 2000 made him the first and only Soviet/Russian leader to have visited the country in 77 years. Putin’s second visit to North Korea occurred in 2024. Between 2018 and 2019 alone, North Korea and China held five summits. Zhao Leji, the third-ranking CCP member and Standing Committee Chairman of the National People’s Congress, met with Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang in April 2024. The month before, Kim Song Nam, director of the Workers Party of Korea’s International Department, visited China and was warmly welcomed by Wang Huning (ranked fourth in the Chinese leadership hierarchy), Cai Qi (ranked fifth), Foreign Minister Wang Yi, and International Liaison Department Head Liu Jianchao.
Despite many foreign observers’ assessment that North Korea-China relations have deteriorated, North Korea allegedly dispatched 500 workers to China in September 2024 in violation of UN sanctions. This shows Beijing’s persistent strategic accommodation of Pyongyang and calls into question whether North Korea-China relations have truly deteriorated.
Pre-Coordination Between China and Russia
China’s and Russia’s positions on North Korea, including denuclearization, changed before the North Korea–Russia alliance pact of 2024. Xi’s visit to Russia in March 2023 marked the beginning of coordinating their strategies toward the Korean Peninsula. In that year’s China–Russia summit, the joint statement deleted “dual suspension,” a formula that Beijing first proposed in March 2017 where the United States and South Korea would suspend major military exercises in exchange for North Korea’s suspension of its nuclear and missile programs. In 2024, Beijing and Moscow went further and dropped from their summit joint statement “dual processes,” a reference to denuclearization and peace-building. Notably, the 2024 summit’s joint statement acknowledged North Korea’s “legitimate security concerns,” echoing Pyongyang’s long-held logic that its continued nuclear advancements are due to US threats. It criticized sanctions and joint military exercises and called on the United States to establish favorable conditions for dialogue. Like this, China and Russia reinstated the “concerned parties” principle, or deferring the responsibility of denuclearization to the United States while China and Russia take a step back. This, similar to the stance China took toward the first North Korean nuclear crisis in 1993, marked a retreat from their past positive engagement with denuclearization. These trends were upheld by the latest China-Russia joint statement, adopted during Xi’s state visit to Russia in May 2025.
China’s evolving denuclearization stance derives from intricate geopolitical calculations. US–South Korea joint military exercises resumed when the Biden and Yoon Suk-yeol administrations took office. Putting aside North Korea’s record number of missile launches in 2022, China and Russia appear to have made the assessment that the “dual suspension” principle was obsolete because of the resumption of the US-South Korea joint military drills under Biden and Yoon.
Given the new security predicament, China and Russia in 2023 began to encourage the United States, South Korea, and other relevant parties to acknowledge North Korea’s “legitimate security concerns.” They even appeared to view the “dual processes” formula as impossible. The stalled US-North Korea engagement since the breakdown of the working-level nuclear talks in Sweden in October 2019 was crucial to this assessment. China and Russia, however, declined to mediate for various reasons. Both countries seemed to view denuclearization or a peace process as politically unachievable and unrealistic, especially without Washington’s engagement with Pyongyang. China and Russia revived the “principle of concerned parties” in their 2024 joint statement instead. This trend extended to their stance on sanctions, as shown by Russia’s veto of, and China abstention from a vote in March 2024 that dissolved the UN Panel of Experts on North Korea.
Conclusion: A Paradigm for Understanding the China–North Korea–Russia Triangle
The overarching premise of the China-North Korea-Russia trilateral relationship is that all three currently have strained or adversarial relations with the United States. In Northeast Asia, international relations are fundamentally based on alliances, and therefore the China-North Korea-Russia and US-South Korea-Japan triangles form the foundation of regional dynamics. This region, therefore, lacks true bilateral interactions. In a system built on alliances, a nation cannot engage with another without factoring in both its own allies and those of its counterparts. This structural reality is particularly salient in diplomacy, security, and military affairs, forming a basic paradigm and the basic prerequisite for understanding international relations in Northeast Asia.
For China, its relationship with South Korea must consider the ROK–US alliance. That means China’s connection with third nations affects China–South Korea relations as well as US–China, inter-Korean, and China–North Korea relations. A third party always determines a bilateral relationship’s trajectory. Thus, any serious discussion of China–South Korea must be placed within triangular frameworks like the South Korea–US–China or North Korea–South Korea–China ties.
Analysis of North Korea–Russia interactions within the US–China dynamic must also consider other triangular configurations, such as US–North Korea–China, North Korea–China–Russia, and US–China–Russia relations. North Korea and Russia must remain conscious of their alliances with China and the US–China ties to secure their positions amid increasing strategic rivalries. Russia must also evaluate its strategic partnership with China, its most significant ally, and the US–China power balance.
This indicates that analyzing the sources and impacts of burgeoning North Korea–Russia relations can shed light on China–North Korea relations. In this analytical framework, the US–China ties are a global constant (independent variable), while North Korea–Russia and China–North Korea interactions are dependent variables shaped by US-Sino relations.
The trilateral relationship between China, North Korea, and Russia is increasing Pyongyang’s and Moscow’s dependence on Beijing. This shows that China, not the United States, is the constant in this triangle equation. China–North Korea and China–Russia ties are thus dependent variables. North Korea–Russia relations, therefore, fluctuate depending on their relations with China. This theory holds that Beijing’s strategic position determines Pyongyang-Moscow ties.