Why did Xi Jinping break years of diplomatic precedent to visit Kim Jong Un? This video explores how the war in Ukraine transformed North Korea’s strategic value, weakened China’s traditional leverage, and gave Kim unprecedented bargaining power. From Russian artillery deals and military cooperation to shifting alliances and global power politics, discover why Beijing suddenly needed Pyongyang—and what this dramatic geopolitical reversal means for China, Russia, the United States, and the future of East Asia.
00:00 - Xi Jinping’s Shocking Trip
01:29 - The Reality of the Alliance
04:03 - The Ukraine War Lifeline
07:44 - How Russia Paid Kim
10:10 - Reversing the Power Dynamic
15:33 - Did Kim Really Fool Xi?
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SOURCES / ATTRIBUTIONS: https://pastebin.com/1KFKp1MX
00:00 - Xi Jinping’s Shocking Trip
01:29 - The Reality of the Alliance
04:03 - The Ukraine War Lifeline
07:44 - How Russia Paid Kim
10:10 - Reversing the Power Dynamic
15:33 - Did Kim Really Fool Xi?
Support us directly as we bring you independent, up-to-date reporting on military news and global conflicts by clicking here: https://www.youtube.com/@TheMilitaryShow/join
#militarystrategy #militarydevelopments #militaryanalysis
#themilitaryshow
SOURCES / ATTRIBUTIONS: https://pastebin.com/1KFKp1MX
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NewsTranscript
00:00There's a particular kind of power that reveals itself not in what a leader does,
00:04but in what a leader no longer has to do.
00:06For most of the past decade, Xi Jinping has exuded that power
00:10by largely stopping foreign travel, and the world came to him instead.
00:14Foreign leaders flew into Beijing, sat through the choreography, and flew home again.
00:19According to figures compiled by the Asia Society,
00:22Xi averaged around 14 overseas trips a year between 2013 and 2019,
00:27then cut that to roughly six a year between 2022 and 2025.
00:33In 2020, he left the country only once.
00:36In 2021, he didn't leave at all, ostensibly due to the COVID crisis,
00:40but the signal was unmistakable.
00:43The center of geopolitical gravity had moved,
00:46and it sat in Beijing, waiting for everyone else to arrive.
00:49So when Xi boarded a plane to Pyongyang at the start of June 2026,
00:55the destination rocked the news.
00:56This was his first visit to North Korea in seven years,
00:59and his first overseas trip of the entire year.
01:02It was a stunning switch.
01:04Xi, the man who makes the world come to him, instead,
01:07went to none other than Kim Jong-un.
01:10To understand why a leader who hoards his own movement so carefully
01:13could be tricked into spending that capital,
01:16traveling to the most isolated regime on Earth,
01:18we have to follow a chain of leverage.
01:20And that chain doesn't begin in Pyongyang or in Beijing,
01:24but on the artillery lines of eastern Ukraine.
01:26Let's start with the cage Kim Jong-un used to live in.
01:30For decades, North Korea was the textbook junior partner,
01:34and China held the keys.
01:35Estimates of Pyongyang's trade dependence on China vary,
01:38but they all point in the same direction.
01:40The National Committee on North Korea put it as high as 95% in a 2022 estimate.
01:46Another tally cited in 2026 still place it above 90%.
01:51Whatever the precise figure,
01:52the implication is that North Korea was sanctioned,
01:55isolated, and economically tied to a single partner.
01:59Notably, trade represented a tiny portion of the country's economy
02:02due to sanctions forcing it to produce whatever it can domestically.
02:06But there's only so much you can make,
02:08and oil reserves are not something that North Korea has.
02:11Instead, many of the resources it relied upon came from China.
02:15Beijing would have two levers on North Korea.
02:18There was the economic one,
02:19the simple fact that it could tighten the flow of energy imports and trade,
02:23on which North Korea depended,
02:25limiting the country's ability to import critical goods
02:28and export its products abroad.
02:30And there was the diplomatic one,
02:32the denuclearization issue,
02:34which China could raise or lower
02:36as a way of managing its unruly neighbor
02:38and signaling to Washington
02:39that it had influence worth bargaining with.
02:42Kim had exactly one tree to hang from,
02:45and Beijing owned the tree.
02:47It's worth pausing to closer examine
02:49how hollowed the so-called alliance underneath all this always was,
02:53because it explains why China can't simply order Pyongyang to fall in line.
02:57On paper, the bond looks ironclad.
02:59Using the 1961 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance,
03:04whose 65th anniversary falls this year,
03:07is the only formal military alliance treaty
03:09China still maintains with anyone,
03:11and it contains a clause obliging each side
03:14to come to the other's defense if attacked.
03:16But the lived reality has been far frostier than the document suggests,
03:20marked by long stretches of mutual suspicion.
03:23There's also a structural contradiction baked into the relationship
03:26that no treaty can paper over.
03:28Beijing has always wanted a North Korea that's obedient and stable,
03:32a buffer it can manage,
03:34not a North Korea that's genuinely powerful and unpredictable on its border.
03:38Pyongyang, for its part,
03:39has always wanted unconditional backing without strings,
03:42and has treated Chinese meddling in its internal affairs
03:45and its weapons program
03:46as a kind of soft intrusion to be resisted.
03:49As the International Crisis Group noted,
03:52Beijing has long been wary of helping build up North Korea's military,
03:55precisely because a militarily emboldened Pyongyang
03:58is a source of instability rather than an asset,
04:01and those two visions were always in tension.
04:04The war in Ukraine became an opening for Kim Jong-un
04:07to test the barriers of those visions
04:09and see how much China values having North Korea in its corner.
04:13And the reason for that is that Russia came into the war
04:15fully expecting not to need nearly as many resources as it did.
04:19But as you very well know,
04:21the invasion of Ukraine turned into a grinding artillery war,
04:24the kind that devours shells faster than a wartime economy can produce them.
04:29Moscow found itself short,
04:30and it went looking for ammunition wherever it could find it.
04:33The scale of what followed
04:35can even be followed through open-source evidence.
04:38The Open Source Centre,
04:39a UK-based research group,
04:41worked with Reuters to track the shipments using satellite imagery,
04:44and the Royal United Services Institute summarised the findings.
04:49Between roughly August 2023 and the spring of 2025,
04:53a small fleet of Russian-flagged vessels
04:55made on the order of 64 voyages
04:58balling around 15,800 shipping containers
05:01from the North Korean port of Rajin to Russia's Far East.
05:04Estimates suggest that the containers totaled between 4.2 and 5.8 million artillery rounds.
05:10By early 2026, that number went to a staggering 33,000 containers
05:15and an estimated 15 million rounds of 152mm shells.
05:20To put that number in perspective,
05:22Western and Ukrainian officials believe Russia's own factories
05:25produced no more than 2.3 million shells domestically in 2024.
05:29When we extrapolate this to the duration of the war and possible production,
05:34North Korea could have been supplying potentially around 40% of the ammunition Russia was firing,
05:39and some individual Russian artillery units,
05:42according to documents reviewed by Reuters,
05:44were running on between 50% and 100% North Korean rounds.
05:48But while this might all sound like background noise
05:51in the realm of the actual war in Ukraine,
05:53the industrial side of the feat is what makes it vital for North Korea-China relations.
05:58North Korea had a sanction-starved defence sector
06:00that the outside world had written off as a rusting Cold War relic,
06:04and suddenly it had a guaranteed mega-customer with a practically bottomless appetite.
06:09The result is that the war in Ukraine and the resulting need for ammunition
06:13were a stimulus programme for the North Korean military industrial base,
06:17a reason to run the shell lines at full capacity,
06:19refurbish old plants, keep workers employed,
06:22and most importantly, get a stock of foreign currency.
06:25The war is also a live-fire laboratory.
06:28Every system North Korea ships east,
06:30and every soldier it rotates through the front comes back in principle,
06:34with battlefield feedback that no amount of peacetime testing could buy.
06:38The production figures here are inferred from the export volumes
06:41rather than measured directly inside North Korea,
06:44which remains one of the most opaque states on Earth.
06:46But the direction is clear.
06:48The war did for Pyongyang's arms industry,
06:50but no domestic policy ever could.
06:53And speaking of live-fire testing,
06:55there's also the tiny matter of North Korean soldiers
06:57as they're part of the same upgrade.
06:59North Korea rotated troops into the theatre,
07:02with outside estimates suggesting between 14,000 and 15,000 troops
07:06over the course of the war.
07:08Of those, it was estimated that North Korea lost a staggering 6,000 of them at least.
07:13And the very presence of North Korean troops
07:15in one of the most technologically-assisted wars
07:17has been poked fun at relentlessly.
07:20But beyond the grim reminder that they were used as frontline expendables,
07:24that deployments are a training pipeline,
07:26and a way for North Korea to get real-time insight
07:28into how military tactics worked in the 21st century.
07:32Remember, while technically in a frozen conflict with South Korea,
07:36North Korea's army hasn't been in a war since the 1950s,
07:39and had no real way to train with modern militaries.
07:42And through all these,
07:43Kim got paid in a few different currencies at once.
07:46The first was cash,
07:47and the numbers floated by Seoul are striking.
07:49South Korea's Institute for National Security Strategy,
07:53a government-funded body,
07:54has estimated that Moscow may have paid North Korea
07:57as much as $14.4 billion for troop deployments and arms.
08:01The same analysis also suggests Pyongyang
08:04may have received only between $580 million
08:06and $1.5 billion of it in the form of actual goods,
08:10with the rest suspected to be equal trade
08:12of sensitive military technology.
08:15Analysts suggest technology transfers
08:17may have formed part of the compensation package,
08:19and it may matter more than money.
08:21The exact contents of the transfer are murky,
08:24and much of what circulates is informed speculation
08:26rather than confirmed fact.
08:28But the categories observers point to are consistent,
08:31and include satellite and space launch assistance
08:33and air defense help.
08:35The third currency ties directly into why North Korea
08:38could suddenly break free from China's chokehold, oil.
08:42Before the war,
08:43China was the one and only supply of oil
08:45and petroleum products to North Korea,
08:47supplying the Friendship Pipeline
08:49so North Korea could run its one oil refinery
08:51for domestic needs.
08:53But a joint investigation by the outlets
08:55iStories and OCCRP,
08:57working again with the Open Source Center,
08:59found that in 2024,
09:01Russia covertly transported roughly 1.5 million barrels
09:05of petroleum products into North Korea,
09:07which is around triple the annual cap
09:09the United Nations had set for Pyongyang.
09:11These were paltry figures compared to Russia's oil exports
09:15and refining capacities,
09:16but it meant North Korea could get a vital boost in petroleum
09:19rather than relying on its official partner.
09:21The last currency is the one that breaks the old system entirely,
09:25and it's political.
09:26Russia has effectively walked away from the sanctions regime
09:30it once helped uphold,
09:31shielding North Korea at the United Nations,
09:33and in practical terms,
09:34treating it as a fellow nuclear weapon state.
09:37That recognition is worth more to Kim
09:39than any single shipment,
09:41because it validates the very arsenal
09:43that used to define his isolation.
09:45Days before Xi arrived,
09:47Kim's sister, Kim Yo-jong,
09:49publicly described the country's nuclear status
09:51as irreversible.
09:52By outside estimates,
09:54North Korea had somewhere around 60 warheads
09:56in mid-2026,
09:57and on the eve of the summit,
09:59Kim was photographed touring what state media billed
10:01as a weapons-grade nuclear materials facility
10:04and a uranium enrichment site.
10:06This is a regime that has stopped asking permission.
10:09Which brings us to the core of the story
10:11and where the lever of leverage turned.
10:14But before we get into the gritty details,
10:16make sure to subscribe to the military show
10:18to keep up with all the news in global geopolitics.
10:22Back to Kim Jong-un.
10:24China's economic grip on North Korea only ever worked
10:27because Pyongyang had nowhere else to go.
10:29It really didn't matter that North Korea's external trade
10:32was a fraction of its economy,
10:33but that most of that trade was funneled
10:35to a single country that could any point stop
10:38and leave it completely isolated.
10:40But for the first time since Kim took power in 2011,
10:44he now had an alternative.
10:45Russia can supply grain, fuel, cash, technology,
10:49and diplomatic cover.
10:50The leash that Beijing spent decades tightening went slack.
10:54Not because China did anything wrong,
10:56but because a second patron walked onto the field.
10:58And the moment a second buyer exists,
11:01the first buyer loses the ability to dictate terms.
11:03This is what reversed the polarity between Xi and Kim.
11:07Beijing's nightmare scenario is not that North Korea fires another missile.
11:11It's that North Korea drifts permanently into Russia's orbit
11:14and decouples from China for good,
11:17leaving Beijing with a nuclear-armed neighbor
11:19it no longer has any line into.
11:21Suddenly, it's China that needs the relationship stabilized,
11:24since it can actually lose globally from neglecting a neighbor
11:27that is at times too trigger-happy for its own good.
11:31And Kim has read into that anxiety precisely
11:33and can now charge for the privilege of soothing it.
11:36All he has to do was host the summit,
11:38allow a few warm lines into a joint statement,
11:41and let Xi return home with the ability to claim
11:43that Beijing still influences Pyongyang.
11:46In exchange, the analysts watching this
11:48expect the tangible things Kim actually wants.
11:51The telling part is that North Korea now has more connections to the world,
11:55as China resumed a six-year block on the cross-border railway service
11:58between Beijing and Pyongyang in March 2026.
12:02That train carries passengers,
12:04but it also carries currency and geopolitical insight
12:07into one of the most powerful nations in the world.
12:10Which brings us to the visit itself and why it was so important.
12:14Xi was the one who traveled.
12:16A leader, who has spent years making the world come to him,
12:19got on the plane and went, and he went largely on Kim's terms.
12:23Notably, nowhere in the visit was the discussion
12:25on North Korea's nuclear armament and possible demilitarization.
12:30The Brookings Institution analyzed the summit
12:32and noted that while Chinese officials still say denuclearization
12:36remains the official line,
12:37Beijing has stopped emphasizing it in public.
12:40This is precisely because Pyongyang has flatly rejected it,
12:43and Russia has supported North Korea as a nuclear-armed nation.
12:47Pushing the denuclearization issue only risks alienating Kim
12:51at the worst possible moment.
12:53For the Kim regime, the takeaway is that Beijing is no longer willing
12:56to make the relationship conditional on the nuclear question.
13:00Instead, China is basically going to need to find another way
13:03to curb its smallest neighbor into submission.
13:05That alone is a major strategic win for Pyongyang.
13:09The fact that Xi chose North Korea as his first foreign destination of the year
13:13was itself suggested as an endorsement, a gift of legitimacy handed to Kim
13:18both at home and abroad.
13:19There is a symbolic shift buried in the language, too.
13:23The old framing of this relationship leaned on the imagery of comrades and brothers,
13:27with an unmistakable hierarchy underneath it, an elder and a junior.
13:31The reporting around this summit increasingly describes something flatter,
13:35a strategic partnership between actors who mind their own interests.
13:38If we look past the verbiage, it's actually a demotion for Beijing.
13:42It's no longer an older brother to a dependent North Korea,
13:46but a strategic partner for a nation that now has economic opportunities,
13:50whether those were created by its own ambitions or not.
13:53But while the China-North Korea relations dynamics have changed,
13:57it's also important to discuss how that affects global geopolitics,
14:01particularly with the US.
14:02Part of what Beijing has historically gotten out of the North Korea relationship
14:07is a chip to play against the United States.
14:09As a trading partner, it was one power that could restrain Pyongyang,
14:13and therefore a partner Washington needs to keep on side.
14:17But that chip works only if China can actually deliver restraint.
14:20After Xi met with President Donald Trump earlier in 2026,
14:24the American and Chinese accounts of what was discussed diverged tellingly
14:28on exactly this issue, with Washington keeping the language of denuclearization front and center,
14:34while Beijing's framing pushed it to the margins.
14:36If Xi wants to keep using North Korea as leverage with the Americans,
14:40but can't actually control that leverage,
14:42then a visit to Pyongyang serves a purpose beyond bilateral warmth.
14:46It's a performance of influence staged partly for an audience in Washington.
14:50The trouble is that performing influence and possessing it are not the same thing,
14:54and Kim knows the difference better than anyone.
14:56And just so the point wouldn't be missed, Kim made one with hardware.
15:01North Korea carried out a salvo of short-range ballistic missiles in late May,
15:05shortly before the visit was even announced.
15:07This fits a long-running pattern in the playbook,
15:10the habit of firing something into the sea right before a major meeting,
15:14as if to communicate that North Korea keeps its own schedule,
15:17whether the guest comes or not.
15:18If China had more control of North Korea,
15:21it could postpone the visit or force it to stop the showcase of its missile armament.
15:25But since China needed Korea's assistance, the entire thing was swept under the rug.
15:30So does the title hold up?
15:32Did Kim fool Xi?
15:34The honest answer is more interesting than a simple yes.
15:37There was no real con where Kim tricked Xi with a false promise.
15:41What instead happened was that by the time Xi sat down in Pyongyang,
15:44there was no good move left to make.
15:46North Korea now had all the leverage,
15:48accumulated from Russia sending vital supplies
15:51and giving North Korea's industry something to export to someone other than China.
15:55However, it's important to note that it's not that China's simply lost.
15:59The Russia windfall has a ceiling and it may be approaching.
16:03By late 2025, Ukrainian military intelligence was reporting
16:07that North Korean shell deliveries had fallen sharply.
16:10The report suggested that Pyongyang's reserves had fallen to the point
16:13where the country couldn't keep up with its domestic production
16:16and maintain the stockpile.
16:18We should note that this is a Ukrainian government assessment
16:20and later reports indicated that the transport has reached higher levels in early 2026.
16:26But this points to the fact that an economy built on selling shells
16:30into someone else's war is hostage to that war.
16:33Russia's progress in the war completely stalled in 2026,
16:37with March being the first month since Ukraine's 2023 counter-offensive
16:41that Kyiv managed to take more territory than it lost.
16:44Russia is faced with a degradation of its artillery capabilities,
16:49stemming from either losing or wearing out artillery systems.
16:52If there's nothing to fire the artillery,
16:54there's no need to import as much from North Korea,
16:57and Kim's leverage decreases as a result.
16:59North Korea understands this,
17:01which is why it's reportedly shifting toward drone production
17:04and sending workers to Russian factories.
17:06It's trying to convert a one-time artillery ammunition deal
17:10into something more durable.
17:12From there, North Korea's economy could become inadvertently entwined
17:15with Russia's military-industrial complex as a whole.
17:19And the Russian effort will keep running on all cylinders,
17:21regardless of how the war goes,
17:23since it literally can't afford to stop and give the impression
17:26that it will concede to Ukraine, a country that it invaded.
17:30The second caveat is that Putin is not Kim's friend either.
17:33He uses North Korea as much as Beijing once did,
17:37and there are analysts who suspect Moscow is happy to dangle Pyongyang in front of China,
17:41partly to keep Beijing off balance.
17:43Kim is balancing between two larger powers that both want to use him,
17:47and that balancing act is precarious by nature.
17:50The whole strategy depends on keeping both patrons convinced
17:53they can't afford to lose him,
17:55and that's a difficult posture to hold indefinitely.
17:57And the third caveat is that some analysts framed the meeting
18:01as one where both leaders walked away with something.
18:04Kim got legitimacy, and a relationship freed from the nuclear condition.
18:08Xi got to reassert that China remained Pyongyang's indispensable economic partner,
18:13and to remind Washington, after his own recent meetings with Trump and Putin,
18:17that Beijing is still a central player in the region.
18:20China is effectively maintaining the status quo,
18:23and it would take something extraordinary for North Korea
18:25to be able to nudge that balance beyond symbolic gestures.
18:29So where does this triangle go from here?
18:31The next move is already visible if you know where to look.
18:35The first signal arrives in July 2026.
18:38That's when the 1961 treaty marks its 65th anniversary,
18:42and the question is whether Beijing puts anything concrete behind the warm words.
18:46Anything from an arms sale, an air defense package, or a joint naval drill,
18:50something that China particularly likes performing now and again.
18:54All of those would shift the balance toward China being Korea's main host,
18:57but the absence of it would be equally telling.
19:00The second signal is the rhythm of North Korea's missile tests.
19:04If Kim keeps launching on his own schedule,
19:06it suggests Beijing's influence is still more performance than substance.
19:10And the deepest question is one the war itself will answer,
19:13whether Kim can convert a one-time artillery windfall into something durable
19:17before the fighting winds down and the Russian dividend deflates,
19:21which is exactly why those North Korean workers reportedly heading to Russia's drone plant
19:25may matter more than any single summit photograph.
19:28Until one of those things breaks the pattern, the balance holds.
19:32China manages, Russia uses, and Kim, for now, keeps both of them booking the flights.
19:38But the big part of the picture is not how North Korea is playing China off Russia,
19:43but how China and Russia's relationship is getting strained.
19:46To learn more, make sure to subscribe to The Military Show
19:49as we cover all the intricacies of Russian politics.
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