How the rebellion in Russia could inspire an overthrow in North Korea

News of an uprising against established rule must be a nightmare for North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un.

Kim’s greatest fear is that his secret enemies — there are undoubtedly some within his ruling elite — might decide the time has come to import the strategy that Yevgeny Prigozhin, commander of the Wagner Private Military Company, had dreamed would carry him to power against the entrenched regime of the failing Russian dictator-slash-president, Vladimir Putin.

It was for that reason that Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency put out a brief dispatch quoting North Korea’s vice foreign minister expressing his support for Putin in repressing what it called a “rebellion.” The dispatch said nothing about the nature of said rebellion, did not reveal the names of the Wagner Group or its leader and breathed not a word to suggest that Putin’s regime might still be endangered. The whole purpose of North Korea’s official comment appears to have been to solidify its relationship with Putin and its undying opposition to any threat against established rule.

For Kim Jong Un, Putin is a valuable ally. Having met Putin in Vladivostok in April 2019, Kim has rapidly broadened the relationship since Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The invasion has been good news for North Korea for two very different reasons.

First, North Korea, as the State Department in Washington has alleged, has been able to sell military weaponry, ranging from munitions to drones, to the Russians. In return, North Korea, heavily dependent on China for oil and food, can also import oil, natural gas and wheat across its 17-kilometer-long Tumen River border with Russia and by sea across a 23-kilometer-wide stretch of water that also divides Russian from North Korean territory.

The revival of Russian-North Korean trade is a reminder of the era before the fall of communist rule over the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics more than 30 years ago. North Korea until then counted on the Soviet Union as well as China, with Russia providing air support and munitions during the Korean War while the Chinese poured in their own “volunteers.”

Second, by expanding its relationship with Russia, North Korea is not quite so dependent on China as it has been throughout its history. China remains by far the dominant partner, but at least Kim does not have to labor under the humiliation of depending solely on China as his only real ally. Above all, he would love to build on fast-growing ties with Russia at a time when both are desperately in need of one another. Russia has got to replenish its military hardware amid a bloody, costly war, and North Korea needs food as it again faces poverty, hunger, famine and disease in a period of renewed hardship, while Kim wastes resources on missiles and nuclear warheads.

For North Korea, the downfall of Putin at the hands of a mercenary mob led by a gangster whom Putin had once befriended would have been a disaster. Kim would have had to form relations with the new ruler in hopes he would agree to his regime remaining a source of weapons in return for the lifeblood of oil and food.

While Kim might have managed in that case to restore the relationship to the same level as his bond with Putin, he would not have been happy about the delay. North Korea needs all the help it can get, and does not want to be at the mercy of China’s President Xi Jinping, who undoubtedly manipulates his generosity as a means of exercising remote control over a puppet leader.

Kim, however, has another equally important reason for breathing a sigh of relief over the failure of the Wagner Group to upset Putin after coming within 125 miles of Moscow. That is that he simply cannot stand the idea of the news reaching North Korea that an insurgent force should have come close to upsetting the central rule of such an important friend and neighbor.

For North Korea, the fall of communist rule over the former Soviet Union in 1991 and the demise of communism in the Soviet Union’s satellite nations was a disaster that Kim’s grandfather, Kim Il Sung, sought to hide from his people. North Koreans to this day are told nothing of the revolutions and upheavals that resulted in the downfall of all the former Soviet leaders and the rulers of satellite nations in eastern Europe and north central Asia.

Nor, of course, does the North Korean media let its viewers and readers know about the uprisings that swept across North Africa and the Middle East in the Arab Spring of more than a decade ago. That too was the kind of cataclysm that would inevitably strike terror in the Kim dynasty. The specter of armed rebel regimes revolting against their authoritarian rulers provided an example that Kim Jong Un’s father, Kim Jong Il, who succeeded his father in 1994, had to keep secret from his people.

But what could be worse than that of an entire private mercenary army gaining such power? How did the Wagner Group get involved in the war in Ukraine? How could a national leader such as Putin have encouraged the group in its early stages? And what could have ever been expected other than its rise as a force that would ultimately threaten his own rule?

The Wagner Group appears now to have receded as a threat for now. But it is possible that the Wagner Group will rise again, or that some other group will rise in its place. Kim Jong Un must be acutely aware of the danger.

For Kim and his dynasty, the worst fear is that restive forces will decide they have had enough. They might even derive their inspiration from the record of the Wagner Group, which had the nerve to defy central rule from Moscow as no one has ever been known to do in the history of North Korea since the Russians installed Kim Il Sung as its leader in 1945.

Donald Kirk has been a journalist for more than 60 years, focusing much of his career on conflict in Asia and the Middle East, including as a correspondent for the Washington Star and Chicago Tribune. He is currently a freelance correspondent covering North and South Korea, and is the author of several books about Asian affairs.