The Putin-Kim affair

VLADIMIR PUTIN'S recent trip to North Korea was a remarkable event for many reasons.

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It was his first visit there in 24 years, the pageantry was especially lavish even by Russian and North Korean standards, and Kim Jong Un and Putin seized the moment with a new mutual defense pact that echoed the Cold War era. But the upshot is a decidedly mixed bag.

On one hand, we shouldn't read too much into the rendezvous. Putin was perhaps keen to show he still has friends days after representatives of more than 90 countries, many of them deep-pocketed, gathered in Switzerland to forge a Ukraine peace plan. That summit came on the heels of new Western commitments, including by the U.S., to provide Kyiv with better weapons and more money. Putin's turning to the hermit Democratic People's Republic of Korea, by contrast, was not the most impressive optics.