North Korean leader Kim reaffirms support for Russia in Ukraine conflict, KCNA says
SEOUL (Reuters) -North Korean leader Kim Jong Un told Russia's top diplomat his country was ready to "unconditionally support" all actions taken by Moscow to resolve the conflict in Ukraine, state media reported on Sunday, as the two countries held high-level strategic talks.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is on a three-day visit to North Korea, which has provided troops and arms for Russia's war with Ukraine and pledged more military support as Moscow tries to make advances in the conflict.
Kim met Lavrov in the eastern coastal city of Wonsan where the two countries' foreign ministers held their second strategic dialogue, pledging further cooperation under a partnership treaty signed last year that includes a mutual defense pact.
Kim told Lavrov the steps taken by the allies in response to radically evolving global geopolitics will contribute greatly to securing peace and security around the world, North Korea's state news agency KCNA reported.
"Kim Jong Un reaffirmed the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) is ready to unconditionally support and encourage all the measures taken by the Russian leadership as regards the tackling of the root cause of the Ukrainian crisis," KCNA said.
Lavrov earlier held talks with his North Korean counterpart Choe Son Hui in Wonsan, and they issued a joint statement pledging support to safeguard the national sovereignty and territorial integrity of each other's country, KCNA said.
On Saturday, Russian media reported Lavrov described the two countries' ties as "an invincible fighting brotherhood" in his meeting with Kim and thanked him for the troops deployed to Russia.
Relations between Russia and North Korea have deepened dramatically during the last two years of the war in Ukraine, which started in February 2022, with Pyongyang deploying more than 10,000 troops and arms to Russia to back Moscow's military campaign.
Kim's government has pledged to send about 6,000 military engineers and builders to help reconstruction work in Russia's Kursk region.
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Immigration FacebookTweetLink Alpha Oumar Diallo hunches over a kitchen counter at a library café in Brooklyn, his nose hovering above a plastic container of brownie batter. Eyebrows furrowed, he tries to pinpoint where this batch went wrong. 'I don't know what you did,' chef Ashley Fils-Aime lectures from behind him, both hands on her hips. 'But I can tell you it's shiny and dark and not as solid as the other mixtures.' Diallo and his classmates groan. Can they at least give it a go in the oven, they ask. Fils-Aime shakes her head. 'Throw it away,' she says, 'immediately.' However stern, the rebuff is also gentle. It could never match what this man was facing just three years ago. Back in his native Guinea, Diallo's evenings had been a blend of watching soccer and baking. As he kneaded dough for bread, biscuits or cookies, his shouts of 'Goal! Goal! Goal!' echoed through the kitchen, replaced with disappointed grumbles when his favorite player missed a shot. 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Migrants shape every corner of the place, which like its counterpart at the Brooklyn library is called Emma's Torch to honor the poet whose verses on the Statue of Liberty's pedestal beckon the world's 'tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.' Ani Tsetskhladze, in a black apron and a cap, chops up onions, peppers and mushrooms for an omelet sandwich soon to be served to the table where a couple, immersed in playful banter, sip glasses of red wine. Her apron bears a simple quote: 'In the eyes of the stove, we are all equal.' 'After my first week here, I realized I didn't know many things about myself,' Tsetskhladze says a few minutes later, sitting with her hands in her lap. 'I was always a very quiet person inside. But now I see I am very competitive. You come here and you start learning, and you immediately want to be the best.' The soft-spoken mother of three immigrated from the former Soviet republic of Georgia with her husband – her love since they were 9 years old – and their three children. 'The Georgian government is now pro-Russian, and there is severe discrimination against minority groups,' Tsetskhladze explains. 'Everything went from worse to worse for us. I was on the street demonstrating, and we were tired. For our children, I would like a better life.' Georgia's ruling party recently passed a 'foreign agents' bill likened to Russian laws used to silence dissent. Hundreds of arrestees have alleged beatings, torture and other ill-treatment by law enforcement, while opposition politicians have faced public assaults. In Tbilisi, Tsetskhladze was an actress who quietly dreamt of attending culinary school, an ambition she could not afford. 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The menus are part of the curriculum, so students learn how to master every recipe. 'We also learn about the history of food, especially talking about colonization through food. What does it mean to have certain flavors, like hummus, that originated in some countries now be seen as the norm in others?' says Kira O'Brien, Emma's Torch's chief impact officer. While 60% of the culinary program curriculum is divided into fundamentals, covering skills like knife techniques, kitchen sanitation, food safety and recipe reading, the remainder focuses on equity, employability and empowerment. A 'Know Your Rights' workshop, for instance, helps migrants understand the law and learn self-advocacy. Students also learn to read a paycheck – and protect against wage theft and employer exploitation. Some workshops are led by Natalie Manukian, a program specialist whose lesson on a recent day focuses on how students should research restaurants, using three specific examples. The daughter of Armenian immigrants, Manukian wears an evil eye pendant over her black turtleneck, her hair in an elegant, messy bun. 'This is the country of immigrants,' she says. 'Whether you were born here or your parents were born here, somebody in your lineage immigrated to this country, and no one should have the right to decide who can or can't be here.' Vicheslav Komotopchyk prefers not to dwell on his trauma. He leans back against the wall, his classmates listening as they cook, and recalls the day he fled Ukraine after Russia's 2022 invasion, one of some 10 million Ukrainians now displaced by the war. 'Take your time,' he says he first told his children as they prepared to flee. Fifteen minutes later, a missile flew past their kitchen window, striking a few blocks away and shaking their house, he says. 'After that I told them, 'Never mind, hurry!'' 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Some 234,000 migrants have come through the city intake system since spring of 2022, with more than 41,000 still relying on shelters, Mayor Eric Adam's office told CNN in April. 'We try to make sure they're feeling psychologically safe,' O'Brien says of Emma's Torch's students. 'But when you have ambiguity about your own physical safety on where you're going to live and things are out of your control, they become really scary, especially for survivors of forced migration.' The cooking school collaborates with other non-profits to make sure each student gets health care, shelter, food and access to immigration lawyers. Meanwhile, instructors teach with a focus on transparency and accountability. 'If I'm going to say, 'Hey, can you bring this upstairs?' I'm going to say, 'Hey, can you bring this upstairs because they're going to need it later for service?'' O'Brien explains. 'That's very different from the experience a lot of our students have had, where it's been: 'Get in that line.' You don't know why you're in that line, you don't know what's gonna happen to your kids, you don't know anything.' Students also are empowered to make their own decisions, from which marker their teacher will use on the whiteboard to new menu suggestions. The authority, O'Brien says, is deeply meaningful, especially to migrants living in shelters, where they have no say in where they sleep, what they eat or, sometimes, what they wear. 'Think about all the different ways across the migration experience that people lose pieces of their humanity,' O'Brien says. 'Trauma-informed care tries to help add those pieces right back.' In the kitchens of Emma's Torch, migrants run nearly the whole operation. And for his part, Diallo isn't giving up on the brownies. He pours out a fresh round of batter and slides the tray into the oven. After one of his releases from a Guinean prison, his friends and family begged him to stop protesting. 'But I was not fighting for myself,' Diallo says with conviction. 'I was fighting for the future, for the new generation.' Now, he longs for those evenings back home, baking interrupted by soccer chatter and the giggles of his mother and sisters. He yearns to walk the streets of his hometown, to hear his native language, to feel his land beneath his feet again. Above all, he dreams of a homeland where freedom is not just a hope. Diallo also wishes for freedom for himself in the United States, even amid his concerns the asylum process – already long and uncertain – will be more challenging under Trump's governance. 'If you don't have freedom, to me, dying is better,' he says. In this New York kitchen, he can taste it. The oven timer dings. The scent of brownies fill the air. 'And thank God,' he says, 'I am finally free.'
