On: North Korea's Kim reaffirms support for Russia's 'sacred' Ukraine war

June 17th

Having spent the better part of the morning in a losing skirmish with a recalcitrant jar of marmalade - a vessel whose hermetic seal suggested it had been engineered by the same minds behind the vaults at Fort Knox - I turned for relief to the day’s bulletins. There I encountered the spectacle of the Supreme Leader of North Korea, a gentleman whose wardrobe appears to have been pilfered from a community theatre production of The King and I, pledging his nation’s full-throated support for Russia’s “sacred” war. The adjective gave me pause, I confess. One is accustomed to hearing the term applied to, say, a pilgrimage or a vow of silence, not to the systematic reduction of cities to gravel. It put me in mind of a particularly oleaginous used-car salesman describing a dilapidated sedan as “previously cherished.”

Here we have a tableau of two potentates, one wrestling with the logistical nightmare of a stalled offensive across the steppes, the other presiding over a kingdom where the electrical grid is a philosophical concept, finding common cause in a sacred struggle. It is the sort of partnership that makes one reassess the entire notion of synergy, rather like a collaboration between a tone-deaf bard and a drummer with one arm. Kim vows to help Moscow achieve victory, a pledge which, given the DPRK’s own staggering triumphs in the fields of famine management and lightbulb manufacture, must have sent a frisson of pure terror through the corridors of the Kremlin. I picture the Russian generals receiving this news, their faces assuming the expression of a man who, having ordered a vintage Bordeaux, is presented with a lukewarm bottle of prune juice. The whole affair has the distinct aroma of a transaction between two patrons in a shadowy bazaar, each convinced he has pawned a glass jewel and received a diamond in return. I shall now return to my marmalade, which, for all its obstinacy, at least makes no claim to a sacred mission.