North Korea and Russia: A Lopsided Affair

As Russia and Ukraine hunker into their winter stance, expending troops and artillery over months for little visible gain in an admitted stalemate, North Korea seems to have leveraged Russia’s falling artillery stockpiles into substantial gains—ones that contravene United Nations weapons and nonproliferation sanctions and have the potential to further destabilize the Korean Peninsula. 

On November 23, in a violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions, North Korea successfully launched its first-ever spy satellite after two high-profile failures earlier this year. This success, South Korea’s intelligence service claims, was likely enabled by the transfer of Russian technology and expertise. 

The ramifications of the September summit between North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin in Vladivostok are now beginning to take more concrete contours. Although the two countries announced no formal agreement, Russia has begun to receive shipments of artillery shells, according to satellite imagery analysis. Russian officials have, meanwhile, continued to travel to Pyongyang, and in late November there were hints that Moscow is considering starting direct flights to the capital of the Hermit Kingdom.

Meanwhile, North Korea has followed this summer’s launch of their first solid fuel intercontinental ballistic missile—a rapid advance in their arms program that appears identical to a Russian missile—with reports of successful tests of new solid-fuel engines for intermediate-range ballistic missiles in mid-November and expectations of a flight-test in weeks. This development took place alongside a recent visit from Russia’s natural resources minister, Alexander Kozlov, for talks vaguely described as concerning economy, science, and technology, but that observers fear will include sanctioned technologies.

The unprecedented scale of North Korea’s apparent gains in sanctioned technologies reveals the depth of Russia’s artillery shortage. The grinding fight in eastern Ukraine is coming down to sheer mass: a war of attrition of troops, tanks, and artillery, where victory may belong to the side that can throw the most steel into the fight. Russia is using heavily fortified lines and minefields to slow down the Ukrainian advance, fixing them in place and raining down artillery on their positions. 

Traditionally an artillery-based fighting force, the Russian army has only expanded the role of artillery as a national recruiting crisis has left Russia hard-pressed to get fresh and ready troops on the frontlines. Russia reportedly expended between 10 million and 11 million artillery shells last year. The Russian industrial base can produce about one million rounds annually, not nearly enough to keep up with the intense tempo of its military campaign in Ukraine.

This is warfare on steel and steroids, where industrial output yields combat power. Russia went into this conflict with flawed assumptions about the intensity of combat and how quickly it could prevail. Now, the Russian industrial base has become as critical as any frontline unit to battlefield outcomes. In March, British intelligence claimed that Russia had begun pulling munitions from stocks deemed previously regarded as “unfit for use.” Annual shell production cannot keep up with battlefield expenditures. Russia has been forced to apply command economy measures to double production to about two million shells per year, but even that expansion will not meet demand. 

North Korea, a former Cold War Soviet ally, possesses a stockpile of tens of millions of artillery rounds that are compatible with Russian systems. The White House has claimed that North Korea has been supplying these munitions to Russia since at least September 2022. Despite the sanctioned technologies that Russia seems willing to trade, the reality is that North Korean munitions are unlikely to change much on the Ukrainian battlefield. Russia is already using artillery at a very high rate: usage will continue to outstrip supply, and the North Korean shells are not likely to affect Russia’s strategy, although the new munitions will allow Russia to last longer. If Ukraine can outlast Russia’s sources of rounds, it may be able to turn the tables on the eastern front.

In exchange for artillery shells, armaments which it has in abundance, North Korea appears to have opened a path through Russia to some of its most coveted technologies. Since the 2006 detonation of its first nuclear weapon, the country has been constrained by nine different sets of United Nations Security Council Resolution sanctions, rendering it one of the poorest and most food insecure countries in the world. Its recent entreaties to the West, which peaked with two summits with President Donald Trump, yielded no relief. A draconian COVID-19 lockdown that has only recently begun to ease has further harmed its people and economy. 

Stronger than its need for food aid, petroleum, and foreign currency, however, is North Korea’s desire for a credible strategic deterrent: reliable, long-range nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles to ward off U.S. military intervention on the Korean Peninsula and to bring Washington to the table under favorable terms. At stake, in Pyongyang’s evaluation, is regime survival. 

North Korea has pursued these weapons systems through a campaign of ballistic missile and nuclear tests as well as a space program that has failed twice in the last year to launch a domestically-produced spy satellite into orbit. The influx of Russian technology is already changing the picture. Further aid may be coming, with President Putin noting that Kim “shows great interest in space, in rocketry, and they are trying to develop space. We’ll show our new objects.” In November, the renewed relationship appeared to yield fruit when a delegation of North Korean aerospace experts visited Russia for alleged technical assistance. That visit and other aid may have contributed directly to last week’s successful satellite launch.

While some fear a strategic realignment with Russia broadening its alliance with North Korea, authoritarians often have difficulty forming durable alliances. Although “it might be in their interest,” as analyst Mason Richey points out, “it’s just difficult for dictators to cooperate with each other.” Ultimately, each nation has few places left to turn for help. Russia has looked to China and Iran. North Korea has looked to those nations as well, with aid coming in the form of food and fuel and, allegedly, Iranian missile technology. While there may be few benefactors, these relationships yield results: vital munitions and sanctioned technologies are changing hands between Russia and North Korea.