(Bloomberg) -- North Korean Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui arrived in Russia for a trip that could facilitate a visit by President Vladimir Putin to Pyongyang and enhance arms transfers that have replenished the Kremlin’s arsenal to attack Ukraine.

Choe will be in Russia through Wednesday, North Korean state media said. This is her first trip to the country since September, when she joined Kim Jong Un for a visit in which he met Putin, who accepted an invitation from the North Korean leader for a reciprocal trip. 

The US and South Korea said soon after Kim’s visit, North Korea began shipping more than a million rounds of artillery and some of its newest ballistic missiles to Russia, which have made their way to the battlefield in Putin’s assault on Ukraine. The flood of munitions is coming as Kyiv’s stocks of certain types of weaponry are running thin.

Read: Ghost Ships at Reawakened North Korea Port Put Ukraine in Peril

Choe is set to have talks with her counterpart Sergei Lavrov on Tuesday, Russia’s foreign ministry said to the Tass news wire. Lavrov traveled to Pyongyang in October in his first such trip there in about five years.

Kim pledged at the end of last year to “develop the relations of strategic cooperation with the anti-imperialist independent countries,” and the visit of his foreign minister is worrisome because it could mean North Korea taking a more active role in global conflicts such as the war in Ukraine, said Rachel Minyoung Lee, a regional issues manager at the Vienna-based Open Nuclear Network who worked as an analyst for the CIA’s Open Source Enterprise for almost two decades.

She also said Choe’s trip comes during a cooling down of ties with China. Beijing for years has been North Korea’s biggest benefactor. 

“North Korea’s policy toward China will affect its posturing toward Russia, and if Pyongyang views it has less to gain from Beijing, or that it regards Russia as a more reliable partner in its fight against the United States, it will pivot more to Russia, which is what seems to be happening already,” said Lee.

The Lavrov trip was part of a series of high-profile meetings between the neighbors that started in July 2023 when Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu traveled to Pyongyang for an anniversary marking the end of Korean War fighting in 1953. The US and South Korea have for months accused Kim of providing arms and ammunition to aid Putin’s war in Ukraine, while Pyongyang and Moscow have denied the charges.

The cooperation with Russia is likely providing a massive boost to Kim’s sanctions-hit economy, while helping the North Korean leader with his plans to deploy an array of spy satellites to keep an eye on US troops in the region.

North Korea’s rubber-stamp legislature known as the Supreme People’s Assembly is due to convene Monday to approve the state budget. In addition to pledges from Putin to help with the space program, Russian aid could allow Kim to advance some of his other priorities that range from deploying a nuclear-powered submarine to greatly enhancing housing supplies. 

North Korea could be looking to step up its military cooperation with Russia even further by sending Moscow new types of tactical guided missiles, South Korea’s defense minister said in an interview with Yonhap News last week.

Meanwhile, Kim has ignored US calls to return to long-stalled nuclear disarmament talks, likely seeing little to gain from any economic aid that might be dangled to entice him into disarmament.

A full readout of the meeting of North Korea’s parliament will likely come later in the week after it concludes and the country’s propaganda apparatus fine-tunes any messaging. Outside observers will be looking at policies to advance the state’s nuclear ambitions and a likely rearrangement of its top cadres.

Read: North Korea Test-Fires Its First Ballistic Missile of 2024 

Just before North Korea announced Choe’s trip, it tested an intermediate-range ballistic missile designed to strike all of Japan as well as Guam, where the Pentagon says it keeps one of the US’s largest munitions depots in the world. 

 

--With assistance from Shinhye Kang.

(Updates with comments from analyst, plan for meeting of ministers)

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