HONOLULU – North Korea will not collapse until the Korean Peninsula is reunified, a journalist and long-time observer of the peninsula said Tuesday.

Furthermore, reunification is not imminent due to the geopolitical concerns of other nations with a stake in the Korean Peninsula’s future.

Ivan Zakharchenko has spent years covering both North and South Korea, starting with time spent as a correspondent with Russia’s ITAR-TASS news agency in the 1980s. He reported from Seoul in the mid-1990s following the collapse of the USSR, spent another one-year stint in Pyongyang after that, and today is based in New York covering the