SOCHI, Russia (Reuters) -President Vladimir Putin suggested on Thursday that Russia could hold military drills with North Korea.
“We’ll see. We could also conduct exercises. Why not?,” Putin said, when asked whether Moscow would conduct joint military drills with Pyongyang.
Putin, who has neither denied nor confirmed the presence of North Korean troops inside a Russian region partly controlled by Ukrainian troops, said a Russian partnership deal with North Korea signed earlier in the year had spelled out the contours of Moscow’s cooperation with North Korea.
“There is also the fourth article, which speaks of mutual assistance in the event of aggression by another state,” Putin said.
“Everything is there. And I repeat once again, there is practically nothing new compared to the treaty which had simply expired since the days of the Soviet Union,” Putin said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Thursday that North Korean troops had suffered casualties in combat with Kyiv’s forces and that some of the 11,000 troops he said had been sent to Russia’s Kursk region had taken part in fighting.
(Reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin in Sochi, Darya Korsunskaya in London and Gleb Stolyarov; Writing by Guy FaulconbridgeEditing by Andrew Osborn)
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