SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea and Russia have reached a new agreement to expand economic cooperation following high-level talks in Pyongyang this week, North Korean state media said Thursday. align themselves in the face of their confrontations with Washington.

The official North Korean Central News Agency did not elaborate on the details of the agreement signed Wednesday between its top trade officials and a Russian delegation led by Alexandr Kozlov, the minister of natural resources and ecology. of the country. Russia’s Tass news agency said Tuesday that officials, following a previous round of negotiations, agreed to increase the number of charter flights between the two countries to promote tourism.

Kozlov, who arrived in North Korea on Sunday, met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and his top economic official, Prime Minister Kim Tok Hun, before returning home on Wednesday, KCNA said. During Kozlov’s visit, Russian President Vladimir Putin the gifted one from the Pyongyang Central Zoo with more than 70 animals, including lions, bears and several species of birds, according to Tass, in another demonstration of the growing ties between the two countries.

In recent months, Kim Jong Un has prioritized relations with Moscow as he attempts to break his international isolation and strengthen his bases, actively supporting Putin’s war against Ukraine while portraying the North as a player of a united front against Washington.

Kim has not yet directly acknowledged that he supplied military equipment and troops to Russia to support its fights against Ukraine. South Korea’s National Intelligence Service told lawmakers in a closed-door news briefing Wednesday that about 11,000 North Korean troops were transferred in late October to Russia’s Kursk region, where Ukrainian troops have seized part of its territory this year, after their training in northeastern Russia.

The intelligence agency believes that the North Korean soldiers have been assigned to Russian maritime and airborne force units and that some of them have already started fighting alongside the Russians on the front line, Lee Seong Kweun said , a deputy present at the meeting. U.S., South Korean and Ukrainian officials have said the North also supplies Russia with artillery systems, missiles and other equipment.

North Korea could receive between $320 million and $1.3 billion per year from Russia for sending its troops to Ukraine, given the size of the shipment and the level of payments Russia provides to foreign mercenaries, according to a recent study by Lim Soo. -ho, a South Korean analyst at a think tank run by the NIS.

While that would represent significant income for North Korea’s crippled and heavily sanctioned economy, it could be less than the money the North earns from illicit coal exports or supplying military equipment to Russia, he said. Lim said. This suggests that sending North Korean troops is less about money and more about acquiring key Russian technologies to advance its nuclear weapons and missile program, which is a major concern in Seoul, said Lim.

As nuclear negotiations with Washington stall, Kim has stepped up pressure on South Korea, abandoning his country’s long-standing goal of inter-Korean reconciliation and verbally threatening to attack the South with nuclear weapons. he was provoked. It used Russia’s war against Ukraine as a diversion to accelerate the development of its nuclear army, which now has various nuclear-capable systems targeting South Korea and intercontinental ballistic missiles that could potentially reach the American continent.