A delegation from North Korea’s Supreme People’s Assembly will visit Russia in October, a senior Russian politician said on Wednesday.

The meetings would mark the second high-level exchange between the two parliaments this year, following a trip by the Russian Federation Council — also called the Russian Senate — to Pyongyang this past spring.

“We’ve been waiting a long time for this visit,” said Oleg Melnichenko, the head of the Russian Federation Council’s Group for Cooperation with the Supreme People’s Assembly of North Korea, according to Moscow’s official TASS news agency.

“We will continue the dialogue begun in Pyongyang,” he said.

According to the report, the meetings will likely focus on economic cooperation, regional cooperation between Russia’s Far Eastern Federal District and North Korea, and cultural exchanges.

Delegation visits between the two allies’ parliaments are not unusual, one expert told NK News, but it may be significant that this particular trip is set to come in the wake of Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin’s April summit in Vladivostok — the first meeting between the two leaders.

“Parliamentary exchanges have been one of the staples of North Korea-Russia ties, with lawmakers from both countries regularly paying visits to the other respective state,” said Anthony Rinna, an analyst on Russian foreign policy in East Asia for the Sino-NK research group.

“Such meetings have tended to focus on economic issues, yet this particular meeting is unique in that it comes six months after the Kim-Putin summit in April of this year. As such they will likely be following up on economic agreements made in Vladivostok last spring,” he said.

According to Rinna, one economic issue that may be discussed is United Nations Security Council Resolution 2397, which requires all countries to repatriate North Korean guest workers by December 2019.

Russia reported this year to the UN that about two-thirds of North Korean nationals working in the country had already left, dropping from 30,023 to 11,490 during 2018.

This, said Rinna, is “one of the most crucial issues that will possibly come under discussion.”

The planned meeting between the two parliaments also comes as the allies are caught in a dispute over illegal fishing.

Last week, 161 DPRK nationals were arrested for poaching in Russian waters, with one of the detained fishermen dying in custody.

The name of the deceased North Korean has not been released, but he was among six members of his crew, along with four Russians, who were injured in a fight during the arrest after the crew reportedly opened fire on the border guards.

On Monday, senior diplomats from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and North Korean embassy in Moscow met to discuss the incident — the second high-level diplomatic meeting related to the arrests in a week.

However, the dispute over poaching does not appear to have changed Russia’s positions in any of the broader geopolitics in the region.

During Wednesday’s UN General Assembly session, the Russian foreign ministry published a list of its official stances on a wide range of foreign policy issues, including the state of affairs in Korea.

The document singled out Pyongyang, emphasizing that any political or diplomatic action on the Korean peninsula must “tak[e] into account the legitimate interests of all countries in the region, including the DPRK itself.”

According to the TASS report announcing the Supreme People’s Assembly’s (SPA) October visit, the delegation from Pyongyang will be led by Pak Thae Song, the chairman of the SPA and a vice chairman of the Workers’ Party Central Committee.

North Korean media is yet to report on the announcement.

Edited by James Fretwell and Oliver Hotham

Featured image: Rodong Sinmun