On July 15, South Korea's ** Yoon Suk-yeol and his wife ended their visit to Poland and Lithuania and flew to Kyiv to hold a meeting with Ukraine** Zelensky. The Yoon Suk-yeol couple also went to the Bucha Memorial Hall on the outskirts of Kyiv, as well as to the city of Irpin, which was shelled, to pay tribute to the victims of the war.
Yoon Suk-yeol's trip to Kyiv was both unexpected and inevitable. As a country with the ambition of a world power, South Korea will inevitably damage its political prestige in the West if it only visits Ukraine's neighbors without taking into account Ukraine's situation.
First, the visit of Western leaders to Kyiv has become a political etiquette to express support and sympathy for Ukraine. Secondly, in the case that Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has already visited Kyiv, Yoon Suk-yeol will not be able to account to the South Korean people if he does not go, because South Koreans have a strong sense of national pride and do not want to lose to Japan in anything.
There is a long-standing competitive psychology between Japan and South Korea, and nationalism is also rife in South Korea, and although the two countries have restored relations and are no longer pitted against each other, the Japanese prime minister dared to visit Kyiv, even at risk of being arrested by Russia, and Yoon Suk-yeol certainly cannot show weakness in comparison.
Yoon's visit to Kyiv also means that the leaders of the major developed countries in the West have already visited Kyiv during the war, and if there are any absentees, it is the leaders of Australia and New Zealand and, of course, the prime minister of Israel.
At the NATO Vilnius summit, the G7 issued a joint statement on assistance to Ukraine, and Biden praised Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida's aid to Ukraine, saying that "in Europe and the United States, almost no one thought that he would stand up for Ukraine." Biden said, "I wasn't going to say that." In a separate meeting with Zelensky that followed, Biden also praised Fumio Kishida, who was not present, saying that he was "directly involved in what Ukraine is going through, which is very remarkable." Japan previously announced that it would provide a total of $7.6 billion in aid to Ukraine, which is already a considerable figure.
In fact, compared to Japan's aid to Ukraine, South Korea is the real big winner in this war. On July 13, during a visit to Poland, Yoon Suk-yeol revealed after meeting with Poland's **Duda** that Poland will continue to buy more from South Korea after spending $14 billion to buy South Korea's artillery, tanks and warplanes. Although the exact amount was not disclosed, the order is certainly not small given Poland's ambition to build the strongest conventional army in Europe.
Because South Korea is in a wartime state, it maintains a strong conventional military production capacity, and can provide Ukraine with 500,000 rounds of artillery shells through curve transportation at one time, which is something that none of the four major European countries can do.
As for arms sales to Poland, South Korea has achieved the speed of delivery in the year of signing and delivery, which far exceeds the normal speed of international arms sales, and South Korea's doing this is also a curve aid to Ukraine, because after Poland gets the **, it can transfer a large number of Soviet-made ** to Ukraine. Although the amount of South Korea's aid to Ukraine is not as large as that of Japan, it has become a major arms sales country in the world because of its large arms sales to Poland, so it has made a lot of money.