(Tribune News Service) — North Korea sent its foreign minister to Russia for her second trip in less than a year to the major backer of Kim Jong Un’s regime. The move comes as Pyongyang readies for a parliamentary meeting that will likely approve measures that raise tensions with South Korea.

Choe Son Hui led a delegation taking part in women’s conferences, the official Korean Central News Agency reported Tuesday in a two-sentence dispatch. The foreign minister who rarely travels abroad last went to Moscow in January, where she held talks with President Vladimir Putin for a meeting the U.S. and its partners saw as facilitating arms shipments from North Korea to aid the Kremlin’s assault on Ukraine.

Her visit comes after Russia last week dispatched Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu to Pyongyang for talks with leader Kim. It was Shoigu’s second trip to North Korea in a little more than a year. As Russia’s then defense minister, Shoigu met Kim in July of 2023 and was given a tour of North Korea’s latest weapons, which included ballistic missiles that Ukraine and others said made their way to the battlefield a few months later.

The exchange of high-level delegations is a sign of the deepening cooperation between the neighbors who have moved closer as Putin and Kim have been increasingly isolated by leading democracies. The U.S. and South Korea have accused Kim of sending millions of rounds of artillery shells and scores of ballistic missiles to Putin, in exchange for aid propping up North Korea’s economy and advancing its weapons systems.

Ukraine’s military intelligence chief has said supplies of North Korean ammunition to Moscow have been causing major headaches for his country’s defense, as Russia’s full-scale invasion grinds through its third year.

The support from Russia has coincided with Kim taking a tougher stance toward Seoul and Washington. This has included stating his intention to remove the concept of peaceful reunification from the constitution, asserting authority over a contested Yellow Sea maritime border and boasting he has the legal right to annihilate his neighbor on the divided peninsula.

North Korea’s rubber-stamp parliament, known as the Supreme People’s Assembly, will convene on Oct. 7, KCNA reported this week. At the meeting, it is expected to formalize changes to its constitution, after Kim at the last SPA session in January called for removing the concept of “peaceful reunification” with South Korea.

He also sought clearly drawing boundaries at places including the Northern Limit Line. The NLL was set unilaterally by U.S.-led forces after the Korean War, and waters around the area have been the site of clashes, including a 2010 incident in which South Korea claimed North Korea torpedoed one of its warships south of the line, killing 46 sailors.

The area around the Yellow Sea islands have been one of the few places to have seen armed conflict between the two Koreas since the end of their 1950-1953 war, raising worries about an exchange of fire that could quickly escalate.

North Korea may also be considering a nuclear test near the time the U.S. presidential election is held to raise its profile, a top South Korean official said in July, as Kim rolls out new warheads capable of striking the United States and its allies in Asia.

With assistance from Se Young Lee.

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