This essay first appeared July 29, 2025 in
38 North.
The three-day
visit earlier this month of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to the North Korean coastal city of Wonsan marked a noticeable intensification of a strategic relationship between the two neighbors. The sheer trappings of the visit—from lavish treatment at newly opened resort to a tête-à-tête aboard North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s yacht—sent that message. And it was accompanied by other symbols of tightening ties, from renewed rail and air flight links to ballyhooed visits of Russian tourists to the resort and the
dispatch of North Korean artificial intelligence (AI) researchers to Russia.
As a result of signing a treaty in June 2024, Lavrov
told Russian reporters, “we became allies.” But now there is a “deepening of ties…rooted not only in our geographic proximity but also in our alignment on key issues,” not least on the Ukraine war and on countering American presence in the Indo-Pacific. Lavrov spoke about a “brotherhood of arms,” about Russian readiness to defend North Korea and “jointly resist the hegemonic aspirations of extra-regional players.”
While the war with Ukraine served as the catalyst for this “brotherhood,” as the North Koreans stepped up to provide Russia with crucial supplies of men and material at a moment last year when their campaign was faltering, it is by no means the only driver of their growing bilateral cooperation. Their shared mission to resist Western dominance and the mutual economic and political benefits that are forming between these two countries may serve as a cornerstone for a new world order.
Growing Russia-North Korea Cooperation
The massive transfer of North Korean weapons and the deployment of more than 11,000 troops to the Ukraine frontlines is the most visible sign of their alignment. North Korea provided a crucial influx of millions of artillery rounds as well as more than 100 ballistic missiles which have been raining down on Ukrainian cities. It is a two-way street, with
sharing of Russian military technology, particularly drones, in return.
Russian oil and food flows freely, effectively
nullifying the United Nations (UN) sanctions regime. This is documented in a recent detailed report on “Unlawful Military Cooperation including Arms Transfers between North Korea and Russia,” issued in late May by the 11-nation Multilateral Sanctions Monitoring Team.
Less strategic, but increasingly important, is the flow of North Korean workers to Russia, also in violation of UN sanctions. According to an investigative report by the émigré Russian journal “The Insider,” some “thousands of North Koreans are entering Russia, posing as students on ‘practical training,’ but instead coming to labor under slave-like conditions.” In the Russian Far East, “North Koreans are very much back,” at levels not seen since before COVID-19, according to a Russian scholar based in Vladivostok, in an email exchange.
[1]
Deeper Than Arms
The illicit transfers are significant but there are other shifts in Russian policy that may be even more consequential.
Russia, once a stalwart protector the nuclear non-proliferation regime, has now nakedly endorsed the legitimacy of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, something even China has balked at doing.
Asked by Russian reporters to comment on what conclusions Pyongyang may have drawn from the US attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the veteran Russian diplomat gave the nuclear status of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) a blanket
approval:
The DPRK leadership drew its conclusions regarding national defence long before the recent US-Israeli strikes on the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is precisely because those conclusions were made in a timely manner that no serious actor contemplates a military strike against the DPRK today. Nevertheless, we are witnessing ongoing military buildup around the Korean Peninsula, driven by the United States in coordination with South Korea and Japan. We caution against the misuse of alliances and partnerships as tools of confrontation, including any efforts to direct them against the DPRK or the Russian Federation.
The technologies applied by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea are a result of efforts by North Korean scientists. We respect the DPRK’s actions and understand the reasons why they carry out their nuclear programme.
While the Russians have avoided direct aid to the North Korean nuclear program, they have cleared the way to assistance and technology transfer to assist nominally civilian satellite development and launch efforts. “The provision of technologies and know-how related to the satellite program is not completely prohibited in the eyes of Russia, since the exploration of outer space, from the point of view of Russia, is the legal right of the DPRK,”
wrote leading Russia Korea expert Georgy Toloraya following the Lavrov visit.
Perhaps equally important, the Russians have embraced Kim Jong Un’s policy shift toward abandonment of unification as a goal and opposition to any sustained engagement with South Korea.
“Russia has de facto recognized the legitimacy of Kim Jong-un’s concept of the existence of two separate, unfriendly states on the Korean Peninsula and the rejection of the idea of the unification of Korea, under the slogan of which South Korea has been planning to absorb the North for decades,” wrote Toloraya. The relationship with Pyongyang “lays the foundation for building a new Eurasian security system.”
For Russian strategists, North Korea has now acquired a status that is similar to Belarus, its military and political ally in the West. “This is precisely how the Kremlin sees North Korea these days: as an easternmost strategic bulwark of the Russia-led anti-Western security bloc,” says Igor Torbakov, a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University in Sweden.
Moscow’s backing only serves to reinforce the hardline coming out of Pyongyang toward the US, particularly their fierce rebuff of new overtures from the progressive Lee Jae Myung administration that has come to power in Seoul.
“No matter how desperately the Lee Jae Myung government may … pretend they do all sorts of righteous things to attract our attention and receive international attention, there can be no change in our state’s understanding of the enemy and they can not turn back the hands of the clock of the history which has radically changed the character of the DPRK-ROK relations,” Kim Yo Jong, the sister of Kim Jong Un,
said this week.
Russia Over ChinaOn the surface, the Russian alliance with North Korea exists in parallel, and even reinforces, the long-standing alliance with China. It may even be seen as a tripartite axis in which all three countries share a goal of reducing the American presence and in countering the security cooperation structure of South Korea, Japan and the US.
But analysts have pointed to signs that Beijing is less than happy with the burgeoning Moscow-Pyongyang ties, avoiding direct comment on them and signaling indirectly their less than enthusiastic response.
“Beijing does not want North Korea to start a war or trigger increased US military deployments to the region, even though it may see North Korea as a useful way to distract the US-South Korea-Japan alliance from its focus on the PRC,” a recent
report from the Institute for the Study of War concluded. “Moscow has less interest than Beijing in maintaining stability on the Korean Peninsula and may embolden North Korea to increase its bellicosity.”
Russian analysts counter that their alliance is a force for stability, not a spur to North Korean adventurism.
[2] Russian assistance to North Korea’s conventional warfare capability strengthens the balance of power on the Korean Peninsula and in the Northeast Asian region, they argue.
But Russian experts also provide support to the idea that there is a rivalry with Beijing at work.
Compared to the security ties with Russia, the long-standing alliance with China, formalized in a 1961 treaty, offers little in terms of security and is a faux alliance, argued Russian scholar Artyom Lukin from the Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok.
“China will likely remain Pyongyang’s main economic partner and benefactor, but there is little reason for Beijing to empower Pyongyang with large-scale military assistance,” Lukin wrote in a paper presented on July 17th to a conference at Seoul National University. “For one, Beijing does not want to antagonize Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo by transferring weapons and military-related technology to Pyongyang.”
[3]Lukin suggests that Chinese interest in North Korea as an ally is waning and that they may even abandon it in favor of South Korea.
It’s not inconceivable that Beijing might eventually conclude a Korea unified under Seoul—provided it remains friendly or at least neutral toward China—is preferable to a divided peninsula with its constant risk of major conflict. Pyongyang cannot but suspect that, sooner or later, Beijing will throw the Kims under the bus. Regardless of what is going to happen in the future, the 1961 alliance of China and North Korea has long been hollow.
The Russian scholar, a widely cited expert on geopolitics and the region, as well as US foreign policy, also points to another advantage held by Moscow—the close personal relationship between Kim Jong Un and Russian leader Vladimir Putin. “Kim feels at ease with Putin, even though he shows due respect to the Russian czar,” he told the South Korean conference. “He will never be comfortable with the Chinese emperor.”
North Korean confidence in their Russian ally may have taken a hit from Moscow’s failure to come to the defense of Iran. But North Koreans may also feel this pact is much more substantial and, in any case, their nuclear capability gives them protection that Iran lacked.
Implications of the Russia-North Korea Alliance
What are the implications of the alliance for the future of the Korean peninsula? Does it make North Korea more adventurous, or more confident in its power? Does it create better conditions for Pyongyang to engage in diplomacy with the United States and Seoul? Or the opposite?
Some analysts have argued that the alliance with Russia is essentially transactional, fueled by Moscow’s need for Korean weapons and soldiers to prosecute the war in Ukraine.
“Most immediately, North Korea’s current level of trade with Russia is unlikely to last after hostilities in Ukraine end,” Andrei Lankov, a respected Russian analyst long based in South Korea,
wrote in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs. “Indeed, Moscow’s financial flows to Pyongyang could wind down almost overnight. Aside from munitions, there isn’t much of a trade opportunity between the two countries; the two economies are fundamentally incompatible.”
In this view, North Korea, worried about its dependence on China, could then seek ties with the US, even South Korea, responding to overtures from both the Trump administration and the new administration in Seoul.
The deepening of ties and the Russian embrace of Kim Jong Un’s concept of a permanent division of the Peninsula, along with a dramatic reversal of their support for denuclearization, suggest otherwise. For the foreseeable future, Russia has become a backer of a status quo marked by hard lines of division globally, and in Korea. And in its most visionary terms, Russians see this as a cornerstone of their bid to create a viable alternative to the US-led international system.
As Toloraya concluded, “the Russian-North Korean alliance could become a factor in the creation of a new system of security and cooperation in Northeast Asia.”
