Kim Jong Un Swaps Trump With Putin in Fervid New Bromance – By Donald Kirk (Daily Beast) / Aug 18, 2022
The budding friendship could very well blow up in Vladimir Putin’s face.
SEOUL—Eat your heart out, Donald Trump. Your ex-love Kim Jong Un has found a new love interest in the form of your old pal, Vladimir Putin.
The story of the budding Kim-Putin bromance is right there in expressions of mutual adoration on the occasion of “Liberation Day,” August 15, marking the Japanese surrender in World War II. Kim wished Putin “good health and big success in his responsible work for defending the sovereignty and interests of the country.” And Putin, on the same day, promised “to expand the comprehensive and constructive bilateral relations with common efforts.”
The exchange climaxed a relationship in which Kim has offered total support for Putin’s war in Ukraine—and may be sending North Korean soldiers and workers while Russians seem reluctant to fight what looks like a long, enervating struggle. As for Kim’s one-time affair with Trump, who claimed “We fell in love” at their summit in Singapore in June 2018, the bloom faded from that rose after the failure of their second summit in Hanoi in February 2019.
Not to worry. Kim in his letter to Putin was confident, as reported by Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency, that “friendly and cooperative relations between the two countries based on comradely friendship and militant unity would grow stronger in all fields on the basis of the agreements reached at the 2019 meeting in Vladivostok.”
