Russian President Vladimir Putin has appointed Andrei Podolychev, the former ambassador to Nigeria, as the new ambassador to North Korea, a position that has been vacant for about eight months.
According to the Russian news agency TASS on the 28th, President Putin announced through a presidential decree that "Andrei Podolychev is appointed as the Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador of the Russian Federation to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea."
This appointment comes after the previous ambassador, Alexander Matsegora, passed away in December of last year. Along with Podolychev's appointment, Putin also issued a decree relieving him from his post in Nigeria.
Born in 1962, Podolychev began his diplomatic career in 1984 and is fluent in English and Korean. He worked at the Soviet embassy in North Korea from 1984 to 1988 and served at the Soviet and Russian embassy in South Korea from 1991 to 1996.
He later held positions at the Russian consulate in San Francisco and served as the Russian consul general in Istanbul, Turkey, from 2015 to 2019. From 2019 to 2024, he was the deputy director of the Consular Department of the Russian Foreign Ministry before taking up his role in Nigeria in December 2024.
Matsegora, Podolychev's predecessor, served as the ambassador to North Korea for nearly a decade, from 2014 until his death on December 6, 2025. The exact cause of his death has not been disclosed.
* This article has been translated by AI.
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