Video footage published by the newspaper showed a North Korean security official in white gloves scrupulously wiping down Kim’s black chair and spraying around an unidentified substance.
The North Korean sprayed and wiped down the seat, the hands, the legs and even the area around the chair as a Kremlin bodyguard looked on in a slightly bemused way.
Another North Korean guard then gave some sort of order to the guard doing the disinfecting. The nature of the order was unclear.
“The chair turned out to be the subject of the greatest concern of the North Korean side,” wrote Kommersant’s Kremlin correspondent, Andrei Kolesnikov.