North Korea is trying to move away from just relying on the popularity of its government among its people, because if you look, basically, at North Korean markets, everything is dependent on China. They're trying to move away from China and this situation. At this point, China is not very favourable towards North Korea so North Korea has to move away from this reliance on China. Here we have China as a success story of reform in terms of the economy, but North Korea is not in a position to reform. This cultification has distorted all of the history of North Korea. They've idealized the Kims, so the minute they open their society and they open their economy, then everyone will see the truth about the Kims and this regime will collapse because the ideology that has been sustaining it so far will collapse. So in this position, they just can't open their doors, but China keeps on pressuring North Korea to open up.
In this situation, North Korea can only turn to Russia. They also need a starting point for this, right? Here we see that it's the 70th anniversary of the liberation of North Korea, so it's a celebration of how Russia came in, the Soviet Union came in, 70 years ago, to liberate North Korea from Japan. North Korea believes that this 70th anniversary celebration is more pro-Russian whereas any celebration of the end of the Korean War is pro-Chinese, because the Chinese came in and helped after the Korean War. Their focus on the 70th anniversary of liberation also tells us that they are leaning more towards Russia than towards China.