Zafer Günü'nde Kim Jong Un’un Dönüşen Gücü ve Stratejik Etkisi

North Korea’s ‘Victory Day’ takes place with Kim Jong Un’s power transformed

North Korea’s ‘Victory Day’ takes place with Kim Jong Un’s power transformed Expert comment jon.wallace 27 July 2026 Pyongyang’s account of the Korean War remains a fabrication. But its rapidly growing strategic leverage is dangerously real. There is a story told by some US officials that on the night of 25 April 2019, Kim Jong Un returned to his quarters in Vladivostok and drank two 750-millilitre bottles of Absolut Vodka. If that is true, the burn of the alcohol can scarcely have snuffed out the sting of the diplomatic slight he had just suffered. Russian President Vladimir Putin, meeting Kim for the first time, had spent only a few hours with his North Korean guest before boarding a flight to Beijing. Kim was left to attend a memorial ceremony in Vladivostok alone, without his host. Kim was over two hours late to the event, remained for all of seven minutes, then retreated home to North Korea aboard his armoured train. Seven years later, the power dynamic has been dramatically inverted, and the North Korean leader has Putin’s full attention. Russia now depends on Kim for artillery shells, ballistic missiles and, most importantly, combat troops to support its war in Ukraine. Pyongyang is now incorporating the Ukrainian deployment into its own heroic mythology. Indeed, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy alleged on 25 July that Russia is preparing to receive as many as 30,000 additional North Korean soldiers, and that Pyongyang is readying more ballistic-missile launchers for Moscow. Neither North Korea nor Russia has confirmed the claim. But its plausibility reflects how radically North Korea’s international position has changed – with implications reaching beyond Russia. President Xi Jinping travelled to Pyongyang in June and called for greater exchanges between the Chinese and North Korean militaries – an unprecedented public proposal by a Chinese leader. In his column in the Rodong Sinmun, the North’s party newspaper, Xi called repeatedly for ‘strategic’ cooperation and communication. As Kim marks North Korea’s ‘Day of Victory in the Great Fatherland Liberation War’ on 27 July, the young ruler has become one of Moscow’s most vital wartime partners and a strategic asset cultivated by both Russia and China. ‘Victory Day’ – marking a war that wasn’t won North Korea’s ‘Victory Day’ has always rested on two foundational falsehoods. The first is that the United States and South Korea started the Korean War. In fact, it was state founder Kim Il Sung who launched an invasion across the 38th parallel on 25 June 1950. The second falsehood is that North Korea won the war. In truth, the armistice signed on 27 July 1953 produced no decisive victor. Measured against his original objectives, Kim Il Sung plainly failed. He had invaded to destroy the Republic of Korea and unify the peninsula under communist rule. Three years and millions of casualties later, South Korea remained hobbled but standing. And the inter-Korean boundary lay close to where the war had begun. Pyongyang’s mythology of victory rewrote its invasion into a war of national self-defence, and transformed an armistice born of battlefield stalemate into an American capitulation. To Western observers, the Victory Day ceremonies have therefore tended to symbolize North Korea’s pariah status: an isolated, Stalinist state, kept on life support by China, with no agency in international affairs except as a result of its alarming nuclear weapons programme. But this year’s familiar ceremonies unfold against a profoundly changed strategic landscape. The story of the war remains false, but the state celebrating it is more formidable than ever before. From Hanoi to the Ukrainian battlefield In 2019, such a transformation would have appeared fantastical. In February that year, Kim Jong Un travelled 4,000 km by train to a summit with President Donald Trump in Hanoi, hoping to secure sanctions relief in exchange for dismantling part of his Yongbyon nuclear complex. Trump rejected the offer and abruptly left the summit, leaving Kim to emerge empty-handed and humiliated. Kim’s meeting with Putin two months later underscored the North Korean leader’s lowly status. Then, in June 2019, President Xi finally reciprocated Kim’s four trips to China with his first visit to Pyongyang as China’s leader. But the pageantry yielded neither substantial economic relief nor strategic elevation, reaffirming Kim’s status as the junior partner. In 2019 and for several subsequent years thereafter, Kim remained a supplicant to the leaders of the US, Russia and China, certainly far from a strategic partner. International sanctions remained in place. And North Korea appeared condemned to isolation and economic stagnation. But Kim did not retreat. North Korea enshrined its nuclear status in its constitution and broadened the circumstances under which it claims it may use nuclear weapons. It repeatedly rejected denuclearization as an object of future negotiations. And it began referring to South Korea as its principal enemy – with which peaceful reunification was an impossibility. It also doubled down on an extraordinary military build-up. Since 2019, North Korea has significantly advanced its solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic-missile technology, tactical nuclear systems, submarine-related capabilities, military reconnaissance-satellites and drone programme. Related work North Korea and Russia’s dangerous partnership Of course, North Korea does exaggerate its technical feats. Yet the cumulative military transformation is unmistakable. North Korea can now threaten South Korea and Japan with an expanding range of nuclear and conventional systems while presenting an increasingly credible nuclear threat to the continental United States. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 gave Kim an opportunity. As the war dragged on, Russia’s losses mounted and reserves dwindled. North Korea stepped in, supplying enormous quantities of artillery ammunition and ballistic missiles. It also dispatched approximately 14,000 troops to Russia’s Kursk region following the conclusion of a comprehensive strategic partnership treaty in June 2024. As a result, North Korea has seen military, economic and political gains. Its troops have gained experience in drone-dominated warfare, infantry operations under fire and adaptation on a modern battlefield. Russia has shielded North Korea diplomatically, dismantled UN monitoring of sanctions violations and reportedly supplied money, fuel, food and military assistance. Most consequentially, Kim has demonstrated that his impoverished country possesses resources that a major power urgently needs and cannot readily obtain on comparable terms. Pyongyang is now incorporating the Ukrainian deployment into its own heroic mythology. It has honoured soldiers killed in Russia, provided new housing for their families and opened a memorial complex celebrating their battlefield exploits. The veterans of 1950–53 embody the regime’s invented foundational victory. The troops sent to Russia since 2024 are being fashioned into a new victorious generation. Courted, but not an equal China has also reassessed North Korea’s value. Beijing still prizes stability and remains wary of Pyongyang’s provocations. Its relationship with North Korea is not the battlefield alliance Russia has forged. But Xi’s visit to Pyongyang last month, and suggestion of expanded military exchanges, indicates that China increasingly regards North Korea not merely as a troublesome neighbour to be managed, but as a prime asset to be cultivated amid its strategic competition with the United States. Of course, North Korea is no equal of China or Russia. Its economy remains diminutive. Its population is impoverished and its power overwhelmingly military. Yet it possesses scarce and valuable assets: nuclear weapons, missiles, ammunition, expendable manpower, a geostrategic location and an unusual willingness to accept risks. Both Moscow and Beijing now have reasons to preserve – and compete for – influence over Pyongyang. On 27 July, Kim once again celebrates a war North Korea started, failed to win and has lied about ever since. Dismissing the occasion as another absurd pageant, however, would be a dangerous mistake. In 1953, North Korea converted military failure into a mythology of victory. In 2026, that false mythology endures – but the power standing behind it has become ominously real.