As North Korean leader Kim Jong Un arrives in Far East Russia Tuesday for a summit with President Vladimir Putin in Vladivostok, experts are seeing more to the potential weapons deal being forged by the two leaders.

"Having to travel across the length of his own country to meet with an international pariah to ask for assistance in a war that he expected to win in the opening month, I would characterize it as him begging for assistance," US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters in Washington.

Andrei Lankov, a North Korea expert at Kookmin University in Seoul, told Agence France-Presse that a Putin-Kim summit was part of Moscow's "gentle diplomatic blackmail" of Seoul because Russia did not want South Korea to supply weapons to Ukraine.

Seoul is a major arms exporter and has sold tanks to Kyiv's ally Poland, but longstanding domestic policy bars it from selling weapons into active conflicts.

Lankov, however, hinted the summit could backfire on Moscow amid the tension between Pyongyang and Seoul, which could force the latter to take side in a tit-for-tat.

"The major worry of the Russian government now is a possible shipment of the South Korean ammunition to Ukraine, not just one shipment but a lot of shipments," Lankov said.

Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul, said North Korea could supply Russia with ammunition needed for its war against Ukraine, with Moscow sharing its submarine, ballistic, and satellite technologies to Pyongyang to help the communist state leapfrog engineering challenges it suffers under international economic sanctions triggered by its nuclear weapons tests.

  WITH AFP