North Korean leader Kim Jong Un shared center stage with senior delegates from Russia and China as he rolled out his most powerful nuclear-capable missiles in a military parade in the capital, Pyongyang.
The widely anticipated parade on Thursday night commemorated the 70th anniversary of the end of the Korean War, celebrated in North Korea as "Victory Day.”
State media said Friday Kim attended Thursday evening’s parade with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chinese ruling party official Li Hongzhong from a balcony looking over a brightly illuminated Kim Il Sung Square.
The streets and stands were packed with tens of thousands of mobilized spectators, who roared in approval as waves of goose-stepping soldiers, tanks and huge, intercontinental ballistic missiles wheeled out on launcher trucks filled up the main road. In recent days, according to KCNA reports, people have been brought from the around the country to fill the crowd.
Photos showed Kim Jong Un smiling and talking with Shoigu and Li, who respectively stood to his right and left at the balcony’s center spot, and Kim and Shoigu raising their hands to salute the parading troops.
The North’s official Korean Central News Agency said the parade featured ceremonial flights of newly developed surveillance and attack drones, which were first unveiled by state media this week as they reported on an arms exhibition attended by Kim and Shoigu.
For a finale, the parade rolled out new ICBMs that were flight-tested in recent months and demonstrated ranges that could reach deep into the US mainland, the Hwasong-17 and Hwasong-18. Some analysts have argued these missiles are based on Russian designs.
North Korean Defense Minister Kang Sun Nam spoke, describing the parade as a historic celebration of the country’s “great victory against the American imperialists and the forces of their follower nations.”
He condemned the United States for its expanding military exercises with South Korea, which the North portrays as invasion rehearsals. The allies describe their drills as defensive, and say the upgrades in training are necessary to cope with the North’s evolving nuclear threat.
“(The) enemies have made a self-defeating final choice that will surely doom their fate,” Kang said.
Kang claimed the United States “does not have an option where it could use nuclear weapons against us and survive.”
The parade followed meetings between Kim and Shoigu in Pyongyang this week that demonstrated North Korea’s support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and added to suspicions the North was willing to supply arms to Russia, whose war efforts have been compromised by defense procurement and inventory problems.
On Thursday, KCNA published a letter by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who thanked Kim for North Korea’s “firm support” of his war efforts in Ukraine. Putin said that interests between Moscow and Pyongyang were aligning as they counter the “policy of the Western group which hinders the establishment of the truly multi-polarized and just world order.”
Kim also held a luncheon and dinner banquet for Shoigu and his delegation following a second day of talks about expanding the countries’ “strategic and tactical collaboration and cooperation” in defense and security, KCNA said.
