N Korea, Russia bound in ‘blood’ of war, Kim tells Putin in New Year note

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said that his country’s ties with Russia had been strengthened through “sharing blood, life and death in the same trench” in the Ukraine war, as he sent a New Year’s greeting to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Kim’s message followed President Putin’s own New Year’s greeting to the North Korean leader on December 18, which praised the “heroic” role played by Pyongyang’s troops in Russia’s western Kursk region and “clearly proved the invincible friendship” between the two countries, state media reported.

In his message to Putin, published by the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on Saturday, Kim said 2025 was a “really meaningful year” for bilateral ties, and called relations between Moscow and Pyongyang a “precious common asset to be carried forward forever not only in the present era but also by posterity generation after generation”.

“Now no one can break the relations between the peoples of the two countries and their unity,” Kim said, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency.

South Korean and Western intelligence agencies say North Korea deployed thousands of troops to support Moscow in its war against Ukraine.

North Korea officially confirmed in April that it had deployed troops to support Russia’s military campaign against Ukraine and that its soldiers had been killed in combat.

Earlier this month, Kim acknowledged that North Korean troops were sent to clear landmines in Russia’s Kursk region in August 2025, following a Ukrainian incursion, and that at least nine soldiers from an engineering regiment were killed during the 120-day deployment.

Kim’s New Year message to Putin was sent a day after he instructed his officials to increase missile production and build more factories to produce munitions.

North Korea has also stepped up missile testing in recent years, which analysts say is aimed at improving the accuracy of its arsenal of short-, medium- and long-range rockets in order to deter what Kim sees as threats from the United States and South Korea. Intensified testing of weapons could also be linked to North Korea’s exports of military equipment to Russia, the analysts say.