The announcement was delivered with the social precision one expects of institutions that have spent decades perfecting the art of saying nothing while appearing to say everything. A delegation, impeccably dressed and carefully briefed, arrived in Pyongyang to exchange pleasantries beneath a portrait of the Dear Leader, whose expression suggested he was both deeply moved and profoundly unimpressed by the diplomatic choreography. Mr. Lukashenko, whose own court operates on the principle that ceremony is the only thing standing between civilisation and the wolf at the door, nodded gravely at every statement, as though each word had been weighed in a scale calibrated to detect not truth, but political utility. The photographs, of course, were flawless: hands clasped, smiles measured to the millimetre, backgrounds arranged so that no inconvenient signage or nervous aide could intrude upon the illusion of mutual respect.

Beneath the table, however, something stirred - not a wolf, for wolves at least announce themselves with dignity, but a child. Not literally, of course; the drawing room remains child-free, as children have an unpleasant habit of noticing when adults are pretending. But the child’s perspective was present, all the same, in the form of that most unsettling of diplomatic phenomena: the unasked question. Why, one might wonder, does a leader whose country has no representation in the United Nations Human Rights Council feel the need to be seen walking arm-in-arm with another leader whose own record on dissenters would make a Victorian workhouse matron blink? The answer, of course, is not in the joint statement - which spoke of “deepening friendship” and “shared interests in sovereignty” - but in the silence between the clauses, where the real negotiations take place. It is there, in that carefully cultivated void, that the wolf is waiting, not howling, but simply present, like a cat that has brought a half-alive mouse to the centre of the Persian rug and is now waiting for the guests to acknowledge its presence before pretending it was never there at all.

The arrangement, as arranged, is perfectly civilised. Everyone agrees. The only dissent comes from those affected by it - the people in both countries who have been briefed specifically not to see what is happening, or perhaps not to see how very like it is to what happened before, and before that, and before that. The furniture is rearranged to conceal the stain. The conversation continues. The child, if one imagines one, has been sent to bed. And the wolf, having made its point, slinks back beneath the carpet - not gone, not even resting, but waiting for the next drawing room, the next perfectly maintained fiction, the next moment when the surface must crack, not with a shout, but with the soft, inevitable sigh of a truth too small to ignore, too precise to deny.