City Pyongyang Financial News

In the aftermath of last year’s attack against the cross-chain bridge provider Harmony, North Korean hackers, who are widely blamed for the incident, are believed to have just finished laundering some ETH 17,278, worth more than $27 million, according to industry observers. 

speech last September. Then, he told his parliament that Washington’s aim for denuclearization was a “delusional obsession.”The two leaders haven’t met since 2019, and the North Korean leader ignored an offer to reconnect when Trump visited South Korea last fall. The Kim regime hasn’t held formal nuclear talks with the U.S.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. SEOUL—North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un kicked off his country’s most important political event in half a decade with confidence, gearing up for an era of military expansion and defiance as a self-declared nuclear power. The 9th Party Congress, where North Korea’s leadership sets out its foreign policy and economic and military goals for the next five years, opened Thursday with a celebratory atmosphere.

Joseph Wu was leading a delegation for a meeting known as the «special channel», the Financial Times reported earlier. It marked Trump's first use of the channel since returning to the White House on January 20. Feud around Taiwan The island nation of Taiwan has always remained a prime target for Chinese President Xi Jinping and the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP). However, Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has shown keen interest in keeping a good rapport with the US in order to tackle Beijing, as per a report on Daily Mail. But why is Taiwan so important for both the US and China? Located in the geopolitically critical South China Sea, the island nation is barely 100 kilometres away from China's southeastern shores. The tiny island country is hub of manufacturing and technological giants. Apart from this, Taiwan occupies the key trade route of Taiwan Strait. Also, Taiwan is part of 'first island chain' which includes territories from Japan to Philippines.

Such units are among the thousands of troops that South Korea's spy agency says Pyongyang has deployed to Russia to support Moscow's war against Ukraine. During the visit to a special operations unit on Friday, Kim said the «actual war capability for guaranteeing victory in the war field is bolstered up through intensive training,» the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. He added that their training is «the most vivid expression of patriotism and loyalty to the country,» according to the agency. Images released by state media showed Kim peering through the scope of a sniper rifle that KCNA said was going to be «newly supplied to special operation units».

Kim Jong Un. Traditional allies Russia and North Korea have drawn closer since Moscow's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, with Seoul accusing Kim of sending thousands of troops and container loads of weapons to help Moscow fight Kyiv. Neither Moscow nor Pyongyang has officially confirmed the troop deployment, but the two countries signed a sweeping military deal last year, including a mutual defence clause, when Russian President Vladimir Putin made a rare visit to the nuclear-armed North. Moscow's top security official Sergei Shoigu was visiting North Korea on Friday, Russian news agency TASS reported, the latest in a recent series of high-level exchanges between North Korea and Russia. Shoigu passed on «greetings and best wishes» from Putin to Kim in a meeting with the North Korean leader.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. SEOUL—When Ukraine was scrambling this winter to understand how to respond to the threat of thousands of North Korean soldiers deployed to fight alongside Russia, it turned to someone steeped in Pyongyang’s ways: a North Korean defector.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The crude stick-figure diagram, sketched in blue ink, details how North Korean soldiers deployed to support Russia in the Ukraine war should respond to the approach of a Ukrainian drone. One soldier—referred to as “bait" in the drawing—should stand still to lure the drone so that a pair of comrades can attempt to shoot it down.

Pacific rivals, state media reported Tuesday, as Washington's top diplomat visited the region.

Kim Jong Un held a key policy-setting meeting of the country's ruling party last week ahead of the new year, state media KCNA reported on Sunday.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. North Korea and Russia are deepening their military cooperation, as Pyongyang ramps up the supply of arms to Moscow for the war in Ukraine and receives much needed cash and oil from the Kremlin in return. Recent satellite images show that North Korea is shipping more munitions to Russia and is expanding arms production at home to churn out the weapons Moscow needs to feed its voracious war machine.

Kim Jong Un vowed his country will «invariably support» Russia's war in Ukraine as he met Russia's defense chief, the North's state media reported Saturday. A Russia military delegation led by Defense Minister Andrei Belousov arrived in North Korea on Friday, amid growing international concern about the two countries' expanding cooperation after North Korea sent thousands of troops to Russia last month. The official Korean Central News Agency said that Kim and Belousov reached «a satisfactory consensus» on boosting strategic partnership and defending each country's sovereignty, security interests and international justice in the face of the rapidly-changing international security environments in a Friday meeting.

The facility, known as the February 11 plant, is part of the Ryongsong Machine Complex in Hamhung, North Korea's second-largest city, on the country's east coast. Sam Lair, a research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS), located at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, said the plant was the only one known to produce the Hwasong-11 class of solid-fuel ballistic missiles. Ukrainian officials say these munitions — known as the KN-23 in the West — have been used by Russian forces in their assault on Ukraine.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. SEOUL—North Korean leader Kim Jong Un appeared to rebuff the prospect of reviving his nuclear diplomacy with President-elect Donald Trump, according to his first public remarks about disarmament talks since the election. North Korea’s state media reported Friday that the 40-year-old dictator called the U.S.

North Korea and Russia reached a new agreement for expanding economic cooperation at talks in Pyongyang this week

Before it started, 56-year-old Kim Yun-suk fell asleep to the hum of insects and woke to the chirping of birds. Now, she is kept awake every night by what sounds like the soundtrack of a low-budget horror movie at top volume. «The peaceful sounds of nature… have now been drowned out,» Kim told AFP.

Russia’s war on Ukraine if the alliance between Pyongyang and Moscow continues to deepen, according to people familiar with assessments made by some Group of 20 nations. The analysis is one of several on the evolving partnership between Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, said the people, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk about private discussions. They stressed that such a move wasn’t imminent and that military support at that scale — if it occurred — would likely happen in batches with troops rotating over time rather than in a single deployment. Ukraine’s ambassador to South Korea made a similar assessment earlier this month. Dmytro Ponomarenko said in an interview with VOA that Kyiv expected up to 15,000 North Korean troops deployed to fight in Russia’s Kursk region – and possibly in occupied areas of eastern Ukraine – to rotate every few months.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. SEOUL : Kim Jong Un oversaw a fiery exhibition of North Korea’s latest suicide drones, highlighting the military capabilities that could be honed by his country’s recent troop deployment to the Russian front lines with Ukraine where such aerial attacks are commonplace. Kim, clad in a black leather jacket, rose from a beige-colored suede chair to watch the drones soar into the skies, Pyongyang’s state media reported Friday.

North Korea will back Russia until it achieves victory in the Ukraine war, Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui said on Friday at talks in Moscow with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. «Our traditional, historically friendly relations, which have travelled the tested path of history, today… are rising to a new level of relations of invincible military comradeship,» she told Lavrov, praising the role played in this by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin. She said Pyongyang had no doubt that under Putin's «wise leadership» the Russian army and people would «achieve a great victory in their sacred struggle to protect the sovereign rights and security interests of their state.»

Korean Peninsula, after Pyongyang said it had test-fired one of its most powerful missiles to boost its nuclear deterrent. The launch was North Korea's first weapons test since being accused of sending soldiers to Russia. South Korea's military said its «initial judgement» was that the projectile may have been a «new solid-propelled long-range ballistic missile».