A series of interrelated motivations underpin the current resurgence in North Korean–Russian relations. First, Russia’s worsening global isolation, as a result of its invasion of Ukraine, and its desire to win the Ukraine war, placed North Korea in an advantageous position of being able to fulfil Russia’s immediate need for military assistance, particularly the need to replenish Russia’s supply of artillery shells. Second, and related, Pyongyang has been able to obtain food, financial and military assistance from Moscow in return, the latter particularly in missile technology. Third, the Ukraine war provided a convenient opportunity for North Korea to join forces with Russia ideologically, allowing the Kim Jong Un regime to evade and undermine multilateral and unilateral sanctions and thwart any attempts by the UN Security Council to hold both regimes to account. Finally, material and financial support gained in return for providing artillery shells and missiles to Russia has allowed North Korea to accelerate the domestic development of its missile systems and nuclear weapons capability, thereby prolonging the status quo of the Kim regime and strengthening the prospects of its long-term survival.
North Korea’s response to the Ukraine war
North Korea’s initial response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was limited to rhetorical support. Less than a week after the initial invasion on 24 February 2022, the North Korean foreign ministry blamed the ‘hegemonic policy’ of the US and the West as the ‘root cause’ of the war. It was thus hardly surprising that on 2 March, at an emergency special session of the UN General Assembly, North Korea joined Russia, Belarus, Eritrea and Syria in voting against UN Resolution ES-11/1, which condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and demanded a complete withdrawal of Russian forces.
Over time, this rhetorical support was increasingly matched by concerted steps on the part of North Korea to align itself with Moscow. As several interviewees made clear, the extent of North Korea’s support for Russia, and vice versa, has been greater than that following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in February 2014. For instance, in May 2022, the North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs decried the US as having instigated the war as part of a plan to ‘plunge Russia into total ruin’. Soon after, in June, North Korea joined Russia and Syria as the only three UN member states to recognize the sovereignty of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics in eastern Ukraine. Following the annexation of those territories by Russia in September 2022, North Korea became the only UN member state to accept the results of the sham referendums held in the territories, and deemed these territories to be ‘components of Russia’.
These early rhetorical affirmations of support were unsurprising, with North Korea maintaining its long-held position of regarding the US as a ‘hostile’ hegemon – a view also taken by China and Russia. Only weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, China and Russia had declared how there were ‘no forbidden areas of cooperation’ in the two states’ ‘no limits partnership’, which involved a staunch opposition to US hegemony.
From words to weapons
As early as August 2022, letters exchanged between Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin raised, for the first time, the possibility of cooperation between Moscow and Pyongyang escalating beyond rhetoric. In their exchange, the two leaders pledged to strengthen ‘strategic and tactical cooperation, support and solidarity’ in response to ‘the hostile forces’ military threat and provocation’, the latter of which referred to the US and its allies. Russia would be ‘ready to offer allies and partners the most modern types of weapons’, whether combat aircraft or drones. These pledges caught the attention of the US State Department, which revealed a month later that Russia was ‘in the process of purchasing millions of rockets and artillery shells from North Korea for use in Ukraine’. With an increasingly apparent munitions shortage – owing in no small part to sanctions and export controls imposed by the European Union and the US, and supported by Japan, South Korea and Taiwan – Putin turned to North Korea as one of the few states willing to offer him any direct assistance.
Although North Korea has previously taken part in illicit networks of horizontal weapons proliferation, these revelations of North Korean military and security cooperation with Russia – which the Kim regime at first expectedly denied – caused concern among the US and its allies.
The early foundations of cooperation following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine were built on a cash-for-weapons exchange. In return for supplying large quantities of 122-mm and 152-mm artillery for Russia to use in its war against Ukraine, North Korea would receive food, financial assistance and Russian military technology. While analysts were right to characterize the early part of the relationship as a ‘marriage of convenience’ – not least during the first year of the Ukraine war – this description quickly became outdated as both sides took increasingly significant steps to upgrade bilateral ties. Several interviewees for this paper made clear that, by mid-2024, the relationship was ‘both transactional and strategic’. Thus, to describe current relations as ‘merely transactional’ downplays the full extent of North Korea–Russia cooperation.
The receipt of food and financial assistance fulfils North Korea’s immediate material needs, particularly given its poor economic performance in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, even though the exact nature and quantity of the military technology provided from Moscow to Pyongyang remains unknown, this likely provision would be in line with two of North Korea’s longer-term goals.
First, the receipt of military technology – including intercontinental ballistic missile technology, satellite technology and submarine-based ballistic missile technology – assists Kim Jong Un’s pursuit of increasing the quality and quantity of the country’s conventional and unconventional weapons arsenals, in line with his earlier ambitions.
Second, by bolstering military and technological cooperation with Russia, North Korea seeks to gain the unwavering support of a permanent member of the UN Security Council in the long term. Prior to the Ukraine war, both China and Russia assisted North Korea in evading sanctions, whether from the UN or from individual states such as the US. While such assistance continued even after the Ukraine war began, the development of more robust ties with Russia provided North Korea with clear strategic and ideological benefits. Strategically, Russia’s use of the veto power in the UN Security Council would allow any North Korean (and Russian) violations of multilateral sanctions, which China and Russia had previously supported – such as in 2016 and 2017 – to go unpunished. In so doing, Russia would reduce the Security Council to its most impotent position since the UN’s inception in 1945. By avoiding any consequences for its sanctions-violating behaviour, North Korea could continue to develop its nuclear weapons and missile programmes without repercussions. Moreover, any future sanctions-violating behaviour on the part of North Korea is likely to remain free from official UN condemnation, let alone sanctions, thereby only catalysing the development of North Korea’s nuclear and missile programmes.
The ideological component of the North Korea–Russia relationship also benefits both countries. The warming of relations between Kim and Putin has only accelerated the creation of a united front in undermining core global security institutions, not least the UN Security Council, with the two states’ opposition to the West also being shared, at least in rhetoric, by China. Such solidarity was demonstrated in March 2024, when Russia surprisingly vetoed – and China abstained from voting on – a resolution calling for the extension of the mandate of the UN Panel of Experts responsible for monitoring North Korea’s sanctions violations, leading to the panel’s expiry. Indeed, China’s abstention in this vote emphasizes how, akin to Russia, it remains eager to ‘sabotage’ institutions that it deems to go against its national interests, even to the considerable benefit of North Korea.
The warming of relations between Kim and Putin has only accelerated the creation of a united front in undermining core global security institutions.
Russia has benefited by being able to demonstrate a counter-response to the West’s arming of Ukraine, the latter which North Korea recently decried as creating the conditions for a ‘third world war’. With Kim and Putin both emphasizing the need to build a ‘multipolar world’ order to combat the US’s ‘hostile’ global hegemony – a claim backed by Chinese president Xi Jinping at the 2024 BRICS summit held in Russia – North Korea and Russia have underscored their common commitment to opposing the values that the West seeks to uphold.
From friendship to formal partnership
Throughout 2023 and 2024, the upgrade in relations between North Korea and Russia was symbolized by a notable increase in the frequency of high-level ministerial visits – across a range of sectors – between representatives of the two states (see Figure 1) compared to previous years. During this time, such rapprochement was most notably marked by two summits between Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. In September 2023, the two leaders met at the Vostochny cosmodrome, a Russian spaceport in the Russian Far East. In his longest visit overseas since becoming supreme leader in December 2011, Kim Jong Un emphasized that North Korea viewed its ties with Russia as comprising ‘everlasting strategic relations’ between the two ‘invincible comrades-in-arms’.
