Kim Jong Un could be presenting daughter as successor as he ‘seeks to portray family as being like British monarchy’
Kim Jong Un may be appearing with his daughter in public to present her as a potential successor as he seeks to portray his family as being a dynasty like the British Royal Family, an expert on the secretive country has said.
Jean H Lee, who set up the Associated Press news agency’s first bureau in North Korea, made the remarks weeks after the dictator made his sixth public appearance with his daughter Kim Ju Ae.
The girl is believed to be around 10-years-old and Ms Lee said there has been a “theme” to the events she has been attending as they tend to involve “weapons and missiles”.
Ms Lee, who reported from inside North Korea from 2008 to 2017, said the most striking images of Kim Ju Ae are from when she attended a military banquet to mark the 75th anniversary of the country’s army in February.
“When you look at these pictures she’s front and centre. She is there. It’s like this tableau of father, mother, daughter. And I think what people noticed, of course, first and foremost was, ‘oh my gosh, he’s presenting his daughter’. What does that mean?”, she told the latest episode of the Sky News Daily podcast.
Kim Jong Un talks with his daughter Kim Ju Ae at the banquet to mark the army’s 75th anniversary
Ms Lee said it reminded her of when the dictator’s grandfather presented his wife and young son, Kim Jong Un’s father Kim Jong Il, at the military parade on the same day 75 years earlier.
Though many will question whether it is possible for a patriarchal country such as North Korea to have a female leader, Ms Lee highlights there are a number of women working in high office in the secretive country.
North Korea’s foreign minister Choe Son Hui, is a woman and Mr Kim’s sister Kim Yo Jong is one of his top foreign policy officials.
“We’ve had female rulers in societies at times where many women had no rights. Queen Victoria, for example,” Ms Lee added.
“But I do think one thing about North Korea that’s very interesting is that women do take on leadership roles. It’s a communist or it’s a socialist country.”
Read more:
Meet Kim Jong Un’s ‘precious’ child Ju Ae – and possibly his likely successor
Mr Kim with his daughter Kim Ju Ae and his wife Ri Sol Ju at the banquet
Kim may want to portray his family as ‘being like the British royals’
On a potential future role for Kim Ju Ae, Ms Lee said: “She’s very young and we know so little about what’s happening inside North Korea to say that this is a succession process, but I do think that we know that it’s a cultivation of the Kim family, monarchy and dynasty.”
“I’m sure there is in some part a strategy of trying to portray themselves, kind of like the Royal Family in the United Kingdom.”
People lay flowers in front of the statues of former North Korean leaders Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il in the North Korean capital
‘Lots of reasons to be nervous’
Meanwhile, James Fretwell, an analyst at the North Korean news monitoring service NK News, told the Sky News Daily podcast there are “lots of good reasons to be nervous” as Mr Kim’s military carries out weapons tests.
Mr Fretwell said the “main reason” North Korea wants nuclear weapons is to prevent the United States or South Korea from thinking they can attack and get rid of Kim Jong Un’s regime.
However, he said North Korea may also want to use nuclear weapons to build up its military to invade South Korea and unify the peninsula.
“Now, that might seem like a crazy idea, but when we look at what capabilities North Korea is focusing on now it seems it has conducted a lot of long-range missile tests.
“It also seems to be moving towards tactical nuclear weapons.”
Read more:
Kim Jong Un brings young daughter to football in sixth public appearance
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Kim Jong Un’s daughter appears at parade
What is it like living and working in North Korea?
Ms Lee, who is Korean-American and now works as a Korean expert at the Wilson Institute in Washington, stressed that the people in North Korea are “not as robotic as they may seem” and many are the “most opinionated people I know”.
“Some are super funny, an incredible sense of humour, really affectionate. These are the kinds of relationships I had.”
Mr Fretwell said he looks a lot at North Korean state media, reads all of their newspapers and watches all of their television.
“Even though it is propaganda, you can get some useful insights from that TV footage. It’s not the best way of trying to report on the country. And North Korea is extremely secret by its very nature.”
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The Donald Trump peace plan is nothing of the sort. It takes Russian demands and presents them as peace proposals, in what is effectively for Ukraine a surrender ultimatum.
If accepted, it would reward armed aggression. The principle, sacrosanct since the Second World War, for obvious and very good reasons, that even de facto borders cannot be changed by force, will have been trampled on at the behest of the leader of the free world.
The Kremlin will have imposed terms via negotiators on a country it has violated, and whose people its troops have butchered, massacred and raped. It is without doubt the biggest crisis in Trans-Atlantic relations since the war began, if not since the inception of NATO.
The question now is: are Europe’s leaders up to meeting the daunting challenges that will follow. On past form, we cannot be sure.
Vladimir Putin, President of Russia. Pic: Sputnik/Gavriil Grigorov via Reuters
The plan proposes the following:
• Land seized by Vladimir Putin’s unwarranted and unprovoked invasion would be ceded by Kyiv.
• Territory his forces have fought but failed to take with colossal loss of life will be thrown into the bargain for good measure.
• Ukraine will be barred from NATO, from having long-range weapons, from hosting foreign troops, from allowing foreign diplomatic planes to land, and its military neutered, reduced in size by more than half.
Donald Trump meeting Vladimir Putin in Alaska in August, File pic: Reuters
And most worryingly for Western leaders, the plan proposes NATO and Russia negotiate with America acting as mediator.
Lest we forget, America is meant to be the strongest partner in NATO, not an outside arbitrator. In one clause, Mr Trump’s lack of commitment to the Western alliance is laid bare in chilling clarity.
And even for all that, the plan will not bring peace. Mr Putin has made it abundantly clear he wants all of Ukraine.
He has a proven track record of retiring, rallying his forces, then returning for more. Reward a bully as they say, and he will only come back for more. Why wouldn’t he, if he is handed the fortress cities of Donetsk and a clear run over open tank country to Kyiv in a few years?
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US draft Russia peace plan
Since the beginning of Trump’s presidency, Europe has tried to keep the maverick president onside when his true sympathies have repeatedly reverted to Moscow.
It has been a demeaning and sycophantic spectacle, NATO’s secretary general stooping even to calling the US president ‘Daddy’. And it hasn’t worked. It may have made matters worse.
A choir sing in front of an apartment building destroyed in a Russian missile strike in Ternopil, Ukraine. Pic: Reuters
The parade of world leaders trooping through Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, lavishing praise on his Gaza ceasefire plan, only encouraged him to believe he is capable of solving the world’s most complex conflicts with the minimum of effort.
The Gaza plan is mired in deepening difficulty, and it never came near addressing the underlying causes of the war.
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Trump’s 28-point Ukraine peace plan in full
Most importantly, principles the West has held inviolable for eight decades cannot be torn up for the sake of a quick and uncertain peace.
With a partner as unreliable, the challenge to Europe cannot be clearer.
In the words of one former Baltic foreign minister: “There is a glaringly obvious message for Europe in the 28-point plan: This is the end of the end.
“We have been told repeatedly and unambiguously that Ukraine’s security, and therefore Europe’s security, will be Europe’s responsibility. And now it is. Entirely.”
If Europe does not step up to the plate and guarantee Ukraine’s security in the face of this American betrayal, we could all pay the consequences.
World
Ukraine and Europe cannot reject Trump’s plan – they will play for time and hope he can still be persuaded to desert the Kremlin
“Terrible”, “weird”, “peculiar” and “baffling” – some of the adjectives being levelled by observers at the Donald Trump administration’s peace plan for Ukraine.
The 28-point proposal was cooked up between Trump negotiator Steve Witkoff and Kremlin official Kirill Dmitriev without European and Ukrainian involvement.
It effectively dresses up Russian demands as a peace proposal. Demands first made by Russia at the high watermark of its invasion in 2022, before defeats forced it to retreat from much of Ukraine.
Ukraine war latest: Kyiv receives US peace plan
(l-r) Kirill Dmitriev and special envoy Steve Witkoff in St Petersburg in April 2025. Pic: Kremlin Pool Photo/AP
Its proposals are non-starters for Ukrainians.
It would hand over the rest of Donbas, territory they have spent almost four years and lost tens of thousands of men defending.
Analysts estimate at the current rate of advance, it would take Russia four more years to take the land it is proposing simply to give them instead.
It proposes more than halving the size of the Ukrainian military and depriving them of some of their most effective long-range weapons.
And it would bar any foreign forces acting as peacekeepers in Ukraine after any peace deal is done.
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Is Moscow back in Washington’s good books?
The plan comes at an excruciating time for the Ukrainians.
They are being pounded with devastating drone attacks, killing dozens in the last few nights alone.
They are on the verge of losing a key stronghold city, Pokrovsk.
And Volodymyr Zelenskyy is embroiled in the gravest political crisis since the war began, with key officials facing damaging corruption allegations.
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Ukrainian support for peace plan ‘very much in doubt’
The suspicion is Mr Witkoff and Mr Dmitriev conspired together to choose this moment to put even more pressure on the Ukrainian president.
Perversely, though, it may help him.
There has been universal condemnation and outrage in Kyiv at the Witkoff-Dmitriev plan. Rivals have little choice but to rally around the wartime Ukrainian leader as he faces such unreasonable demands.
The genesis of this plan is unclear.
Was it born from Donald Trump’s overinflated belief in his peacemaking abilities? His overrated Gaza ceasefire plan attracted lavish praise from world leaders, but now seems mired in deepening difficulty.
The fear is Mr Trump’s team are finding ways to allow him to walk away from this conflict altogether, blaming Ukrainian intransigence for the failure of his diplomacy.
Mr Trump has already ended financial support for Ukraine, acting as an arms dealer instead, selling weapons to Europe to pass on to the invaded democracy.
If he were to take away military intelligence support too, Ukraine would be blind to the kind of attacks that in recent days have killed scores of civilians.
Europe and Ukraine cannot reject the plan entirely and risk alienating Mr Trump.
They will play for time and hope against all the evidence he can still be persuaded to desert the Kremlin and put pressure on Vladimir Putin to end the war, rather than force Ukraine to surrender instead.
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