North Korean and Russian foreign ministers to meet as Western concerns mount

By Dmitry Antonov

MOSCOW (Reuters) -North Korean Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui will hold strategic consultations in Moscow with her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, Russia said on Wednesday, amid growing Western concern that North Korea may be about to join the Ukraine war on Russia's side.

Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, told a press briefing the North Korean minister was on her way to Moscow and that details of her talks with Lavrov, including the timing, would be released later.

Choe arrived in Russia's far east on Tuesday on her way to Moscow, Russian state media said. The visit, her second to Russia in six weeks, comes as the Russia-Ukraine war appears to have taken a dangerous new turn, with NATO and South Korea expressing alarm that North Korean troops could soon be entering the conflict to support Moscow.

The United States and NATO say some North Korean soldiers are in the Kursk region, a Russian border area where Ukrainian forces staged a major incursion in August and hold hundreds of square kilometres of territory. A couple of thousand more North Korean troops were heading there, the Pentagon said on Tuesday.

U.S. President Joe Biden has described the North Korean deployment as "very dangerous" and said Ukraine should strike back against North Korean troops "if they cross into Ukraine".

Russian President Vladimir Putin has not denied the presence of North Korean troops in Russia. Moscow says it has every right to develop its relations with Pyongyang as it sees fit, including under the terms of a mutual defence clause agreed earlier this year.

Asked if Choe's visit was related to the Ukraine war, ministry spokeswoman Zakharova said it was part of a developing foreign policy dialogue between two neighbouring friendly countries.

"This is normal diplomacy. This should not raise questions for anyone," she said.

North Korea has been under U.N. sanctions for its ballistic missile and nuclear programmes since 2006, but Russia last March vetoed the annual renewal of a panel of experts monitoring their enforcement.

Asked if Russia would withdraw from the U.N. sanctions, Zakharova said the situation was developing and Moscow was "drawing conclusions".

She said, however, that the sanctions had failed to resolve tensions on the Korean peninsula and had been turned into a "blunt weapon" against Pyongyang by the United States and its allies.

(Reporting by Dmitry Antonov, editing by Mark Trevelyan and Alex Richardson)