While the Bush administration wants to freeze economic ties with North Korea until the country puts its nuclear program under international controls, Russia's Far East is aggressively repairing and expanding its relationship with North Korea.
Invited by the North Korean government, teams of Russian engineers have in recent weeks inspected the cargo port of Najin, the oil refinery at the port and a stretch of railway that crosses the two countries' short common border at the Tumen River. All three facilities, built by the Soviet Union, have been in mothballs or lightly used in recent years.
Russian workers are scheduled to build the first highway bridge linking North Korea and Russia. To speed rail traffic, they will also renovate the railroad south to Najin, which is 40km from the Russian border. New fishing and seafood-processing joint ventures are planned. And with the inauguration two weeks ago of a new hydroelectric plant, the Russian Far East now produces 30 percent more electric power than it needs; planners are talking with North Korea and South Korea about distributing it through power lines down the Korean peninsula.
"We are almost destined for these contacts," said Victor Gorchakov, vice governor for foreign economic relations of the Primorye region of Russia. "We live here and are interested in a quiet and comfortable situation."
Speaking on Monday in Vladivostok, 120km from the North Korean border, Gorchakov expressed opposition to Washington's policy of containment.
"If driven into a corner, as they are now," he said of the North Korean government, "they will bite."
His comments came after the US, South Korea and Japan worked out a set of principles last weekend for an agreement to end North Korea's nuclear program. But the framework did not contain a schedule for delivering energy or economic aid to the North.
During the Communist era, economic cooperation between the Russian Far East and North Korea was intensive. But, for most of the last decade, Russian executives here saw North Korea, a nation of 22 million people, as dead economic space.
"As for business with North Korea, I, like many other people here, wouldn't want to invest," said Djambulat Tekiev, a local politician and the leading businessman in Khasan, the Russian district directly bordering North Korea. "I had one experience with trade with North Korea -- and they didn't pay."
Instead, Tekiev has set up a cargo and passenger ferry service on a route intended to bypass North Korea: the ferries sail twice weekly between Vladivostok and Sokcho, a South Korean port just south of the demilitarized zone, with a stop at Zarubino, a Russian town near the North Korean border.
Now, though, Russian officials say they detect moves toward markets and pragmatism in North Korea.
"There is a new generation of people," Gorchakov said, recalling two North Korean ministers who recently came here on separate visits. After describing their overseas experience and their drive to make business deals, he added, "There are quite a number of pragmatic people in North Korea."
The days of aid to North Korea on the Soviet scale are gone, Russian officials say; the plans for renovating the port, the oil refinery and part of the cross-border railroad depend on the Russians getting an ownership stake in the facilities or a guaranteed stream of revenue from them. Still, with complementary road, rail, port and energy projects planned on the Russian side, the investments would re-establish Russia's influence in Korea's northeastern corner.
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