MOSCOW -- Russia is prepared to repair North Korea's damaged rail network and link it to its rival South Korea but only on condition that future freight runs through Russia rather than China, officials said Tuesday.

Russian Railways Minister Gennady Fadeyev met his North Korean counterpart Kim Yong Sam last week in Pyongyang to examine plans for a railway that would link the communist state to Russia and then to Europe, via the trans-Siberian railway.

However, Russia has expressed concern that the North Korean leadership, after winning Moscow's assistance, would later opt to move its cargo through a rival link running through China.

Viktor Popov, the head of Russia's Far Eastern Rail Network, told Ria Novosti news agency that the rail agencies representing Moscow, Pyongyang and Seoul have tentatively agreed to meet next year in the Russian port city of Vladivostok.

Should the project come to fruition soon, Russia would earn some 15 billion dollars in transit fees by 2010, rail official told Ria Novosti.

The project came a step closer to reality in September when soldiers from rival North and South Koreas, which have been technically at war since their 1950-53 conflict, began clearing mines from their heavily fortified buffer zone.

The link is projected to allow massive savings in time and cost for cargo deliveries.

In September, Russia began the task of upgrading the Far Eastern stretch of the trans-siberian railway leading to its border with North Korea, with a view to eventually completing a link to both Koreas.

In August last year, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il visited Moscow and indicated support for a Russian project to modernize a stretch of the North's dilapidated Soviet-built railway network from the Russian border to the frontier with South Korea.