Kim Jong Un pledges invariable support for Russia's 'sacred war'

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un told Vladimir Putin that he is convinced of a Russian victory in what he called the present sacred war to defend national security interests and international justice. The Korean Central News Agency published the text on Tuesday. Kim sent the letter on Monday as a reply to Putin's congratulations on the 78th anniversary of North Korea's founding, which fell on 9 September.

"I promise my invariable support to you, dear friend, and the fraternal Russian people," the letter said, in the wording carried by KCNA and confirmed across Reuters, Yonhap and UPI. Kim wrote that the two states are writing a new biography of alliance while they protect justice and peace through an uneven historical storm. He said Pyongyang's will is firm to expand and deepen joint work with Russia in a comprehensive way, on the basis of friendship, mutual aid and what he called firm alliance relations.

He did not define joint work. The phrase sits on top of a record that no longer needs code. North Korea and Russia signed a comprehensive strategic partnership in June 2024 during Putin's visit to Pyongyang. The treaty requires military assistance without delay if either side is attacked. South Korea's National Intelligence Service has said Pyongyang shipped munitions in large container loads and deployed about 15,000 troops to help Russian forces in the Kursk region, with roughly 2,000 of those soldiers killed. Those figures are South Korean assessments. They have not been independently audited, but they are the numbers sitting in allied briefings when Kim's letter is read in Seoul, Tokyo and Washington.

The timing is not accidental. Russia holds a parliamentary election this month. A public pledge from a treaty ally costs Kim little and gives Putin a foreign-policy line for domestic use. It also tells Ukrainian and NATO planners that the manpower and shell pipeline from the Korean peninsula is still treated in Pyongyang as a settled commitment rather than a one-off experiment.

Xi Jinping sent his own founding-day message. Kim's reply to Putin is the one that used the sacred-war formula. That formula matters because it is how Pyongyang now writes Ukraine into its own ideology: not as a distant European war, but as a test of the alliance text signed in 2024. If the letter is followed by new troop rotations or a new munitions protocol, the sacred-war sentence will have been an operational preface. If it is not, it will still have been a political fact that Moscow can quote.

The open question is what "comprehensive" covers beyond men and shells. Energy, labour and satellite work have all been named in earlier joint statements. Tuesday's letter added no numbers on those files. It added a loyalty sentence and a victory sentence. Those are the two lines that governments that monitor the treaty will file against the next movement of trains and ships.