Stirring depictions of North Korean soldiers and their Russian comrades resisting a hostile West dominate a Moscow exhibition celebrating increasingly close ties with Pyongyang.

The walls of Moscow's Museum of Decorative Arts are lined with grandiose tributes by North Korean artists to the flourishing partnership formed in the heat of battle in Ukraine.

The two countries have bolstered political, military, economic and cultural links amid Russia's offensive on Ukraine, casting themselves as brotherly nations.

Moscow and Pyongyang spent months denying and ignoring Western reports that thousands of North Korean soldiers had been deployed to Russia's western Kursk region to fight off a Ukrainian incursion.

But when Russia declared in April it had expelled Kyiv's troops from its territory,

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