VLADIVOSTOK - North Korean leader Kim Jong Il capped his second visit to Russia in a year with a long meeting with President Vladimir Putin and a taste of the consumer delights that are in short supply in his hermetic and impoverished country.
Putin and Kim talked for about 3 1/2 hours at a government meeting house outside Vladivostok, Russia's main Pacific Coast city. Kim made no comments after the meeting, but as he walked away with Putin he appeared pleased, smiling and spreading his arms wide.
The Russian president said little more, giving only a short synopsis of the talks, which he said focused on economic development. In particular, he said the two leaders talked about potential Russian involvement in a proposal to link the rail systems of South and North Korea, which were severed a half-century ago, and improving the system's connection with Russia's Trans-Siberian railroad.
Such a linkage would give export-driven South Korea an alternative to shipping its goods to Western Europe by sea and would boost Russia's revenues with tariffs for the journey across its sprawling expanse.
However, critics say the proposal's estimated cost of dlrs 3 billion is too high for its potential benefits and that transiting cargo between the different gauges of the Korean, Russian and Western European rail systems would be laborious.
Putin also said he and Kim discussed the on-again, off-again efforts to improve relations between North and South Korea, now separated by the world's most heavily militarized border.
"I want to underline once again that Russia is prepared to contribute to regularizing the situation on the Korean peninsula," Putin said.
Before the meeting, Kim visited a seaport, a store and a bakery. The local Vostok Media news agency said Kim chose the Vladivostok Commercial Seaport because it was where Soviet troops boarded ships to depart for Korea for battles with the Japanese army during World War II.
Kim then proceeded to the Ignat department store, which remained open to the public during the 30-minute visit. Mayor Yuri Kopylov, who accompanied Kim on his city tour, said the North Korean leader was interested in a department selling Russian Orthodox icons, and he bought one as a present for Kim. According to Kopylov, Kim is going to build a small Orthodox church in Pyongyang and hang the icon there.
After the store, Kim, North Korean and Russian officials had a lunch featuring traditional Russian dumplings, beet and cabbage soup, seafood and cold vodka, Kopylov said.
Next Kim's delegation went to a baking plant where they spent about 40 minutes. Kim's aides were seen taking a picture, wrapped up in paper, out of a little truck that trailed Kim's motorcade. They then carried the picture inside, apparently to give as a present. After Kim left, the truck backed up toward the bakery and Russian workers loaded it with several dozen cakes.
"He was very interested in new products and new technology," Kopylov said, adding that Kim especially like bread that contained kelp and charcoal. On previous stops on his Far East tour, Kim visited shipyards, defense plants and other manufacturers including a pharmaceutical plant and a cable factory.
Kim's interest in consumer products and heavy industries and medicines underlines the desperation into which North Korea, a communist country where Kim inherited a cult of personality from his late father, has fallen since the collapse of European Communism.
Trade relationships with countries that once had an ideological kinship with North Korea have disintegrated and the country's crumbling manufacturing sector has little to offer on a strictly economic basis.
Russian-North Korean trade turnover fell some 80 percent in the decade since the Soviet collapse, to dlrs 115 million in 2001, according to the Russian Ministry for Economic Development. Most of North Korea's exports to Russia are clothing, fabric and fish, along with re-export of goods brought in from Japan and China.
Kim also is showing more inclination to venture outside his small country's tightly guarded borders. Although he is famously reclusive, the current four-day visit is his second to Russia in just over a year. Last summer, he made a surprising 24-day train trek across the sprawling country.
Russia potentially has much to gain economically and politically by cultivating ties with Kim's regime. North Korea is hungry for Russian coal and minerals and for skilled technicians to rebuild Soviet-built refineries and factories that have gone idle.
Meeting with Kim, meanwhile, underlined Putin's drive to boost Russia's influence and prestige in foreign affairs after a decade of being overshadowed by the West.
U.S. President George W. Bush has labeled North Korea, Iran and Iraq an "axis of evil," and although Putin has supported the U.S. campaign against terrorism, he has worked for ties with those countries rather than denouncing them.
Just hours before the Kim-Putin meeting, a U.S. State Department official said the Bush administration had imposed sanctions on a North Korean company for selling Scud missile parts to Yemen.
Some analysts suggest Russia's moves toward North Korea, Iran and Iraq aim at reducing their potential threat by improving their domestic conditions and drawing them into the mainstream.
In addition, the moves fit the Kremlin's often-stated foreign policy goal of a "multi-polar world" in which the United States is not dominant.
/The Associated Press
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