Putin Abandons Caution on North Korea in Pursuit of Victory in Ukraine

The invasion of Ukraine has led the Russian leader to jettison cooperation with the West over North Korea’s nuclear arsenal in favor of an ever-deepening military alliance with Pyongyang.

Thousands of North Korean men converged on Russia’s Pacific Coast six years ago. President Vladimir V. Putin had decided to punish North Korea for developing nuclear weapons, and the men — North Korean laborers used by Russian businesses — were being sent home.

The North Koreans are now being welcomed back to the same Russian region, this time as soldiers. American, Ukrainian and South Korean intelligence agencies have said thousands of them have arrived in recent weeks to aid the Russian war effort in Ukraine, deepening a military alliance resurrected by Mr. Putin and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, earlier this year.

The arrival of North Korean soldiers highlights the dramatic transformation of Russia’s relationship with its neighbors and the wider world following the invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago.

Russia’s complex economic and political interests on the global stage have been subsumed by the narrow calculus of the war, which the Kremlin has portrayed as an existential struggle for national survival.

Mr. Putin’s sudden embrace of North Korea, a pariah to much of the world, also shows how the war in Ukraine has erased the last areas of Russia’s cooperation with the West, throwing issues of global importance such as arms control and nuclear nonproliferation into dangerous, uncertain territory. The days when Russia cooperated with a broad coalition, including China and the United States, to try to rein in the North’s nuclear ambitions have vanished.

“This is a major about face for the Russian policy,” said Alexander Gabuev, an expert on Russia’s relations with Asia at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, a Berlin-based research group.

“If Russia had previously positioned itself as a useful partner to the West in dealing with problematic nations, it has now turned into a giant problem itself,” he added.

Russia’s definitive break with the U.S.-led global order is likely to persist long after the fighting in Ukraine subsides, helping to shape geopolitical collisions like the United States’ standoff with China, Mr. Gabuev added.

The war in Ukraine has changed Russia’s relations with other neighbors beyond Ukraine. Finland and Sweden have joined NATO, ending decades of neutrality to protect themselves against the threat of Russian aggression. Russia’s closest political ally, Belarus, has moved further into Moscow’s orbit, becoming a logistical hub for the Russian invasion.

And China has become Russia’s main economic partner, replacing the West as the main buyer of Russian energy exports, as well as a crucial source of consumer goods and dual-use technologies used by Russia in the war, such as drones.

Russia’s relationship with North Korea, however, has arguably undergone the most dramatic transformation.

The countries’ Cold War-era military alliance officially ended with the fall of the Soviet Union. Impoverished and technologically backward, North Korea had little to offer Russia as the Kremlin built a market economy in the subsequent decades.

Mr. Putin’s rise to power in 1999 coincided with a jump in oil and gas prices, fueling Russia’s economic boom, which left little need for North Korean imports, beyond the people it could supply for manual labor.

North Korea’s pressing economic needs allowed Mr. Putin to push a harder diplomatic bargain with the former ally. The country’s illicit development of nuclear weapons worried the Kremlin, which saw it as a threat to regional stability and its own influence in Asia.

After North Korea proclaimed itself a nuclear power in 2012, containing its arsenal became a rare shared goal between Russia, China and the West, even as they engaged in a broader standoff.

In 2017, Russia joined the rest of the United Nations Security Council in imposing comprehensive economic sanctions on North Korea, effectively cutting off Pyongyang from the global economy. Russia never fully complied with those restrictions, but a major reduction of trade did deprive the North of one of the few markets for its limited exports.

Russia gradually wound down the use of North Korean workers, a major source of foreign currency for Pyongyang, despite protests from Russian businesses. The number of registered North Korean workers in Russia fell from a high of 34,000 in 2017 to 11,000 by the end of the following year, according to the most recent available official statistics.

Though limited in number, those workers were highly valued by Russian employers, who sometimes compared them to soldiers, because of their discipline.

The economic crackdown went beyond labor. Russian banks stopped dealing with companies associated with North Korea and regulators stopped renewing their licenses.

These measures, and border closures caused by the pandemic, brought economic ties to a halt. Bilateral trade fell from the peak of $220 million in 2005 to $3.8 million in 2022, according to the Russian statistical agency and state media.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that year dramatically reversed the trend.

Once it became a war of attrition, Russia began to run low on ammunition and soldiers. In North Korea, Mr. Putin found one of the few nations willing and able to help.

In the summer of last year, Ukrainian soldiers begun to find shells with North Korean markings on battlefields. South Korean defense officials have said that since August 2023, North Korea has sent more than 13,000 shipping containers of artillery rounds, anti-tank rockets and KN-23 short-range ballistic missiles to Russia. It also dispatched technicians and officers to help operate those weapons.

It is unknown how Russia compensates Pyongyang for those supplies. Mr. Gabuev speculated that Russia could be paying North Korea with basic products that are in short supply in the Communist state, such as food and fuel. It could also be sharing valuable technology with Pyongyang, he said.

The use of North Korean weapons in Ukraine also has practical value for Pyongyang, Western military analysts said. North Korean technicians are able to observe and collect data about how the country’s weapons perform in modern warfare, especially against Western air-defense systems used by its enemy, South Korea.

The flow of weapons has led to a broader relaxation of trade restrictions between Russia and North Korea, as well as the end of the Kremlin’s efforts to uphold the U.N. sanctions. The value of goods traded by North Korea and Russia, which excludes classified categories such as weapons, jumped ninefold last year, to nearly $35 million, according to Russian state media.

Diplomatic rapprochement followed.

Mr. Putin rolled out the red carpet for Mr. Kim when he visited Russia last September and toured the aviation, rocket and naval military facilities in the country’s Far East.

Mr. Kim, for his part, offered perhaps the strongest endorsement of Russia’s invasion by a foreign leader, toasting the Kremlin’s “sacred struggle” against a “band of evil” — the West.

At that meeting, Mr. Putin still signaled that North Korea’s nuclear weapons presented a limit to the two countries’s military cooperation.

“There are certain restrictions, Russia abides by those restrictions,” Mr. Putin said. “But there are things we of course can talk about.”

Inconclusive fighting in Ukraine appears to have led Mr. Putin to jettison this approach.

In June, the Russian leader made his first visit to Pyongyang in nearly a quarter-century. The two countries officially resurrected their Cold War-era military treaty amid grandiose public celebrations.

Abandoning his previous concerns, Mr. Putin came close during the trip to giving Mr. Kim his most coveted prize: Acceptance of North Korea as a nuclear power.

“Pyongyang has the right to take reasonable measures to strengthen its own defense capability, ensure national security and protect sovereignty,” Mr. Putin said.

The arrival of North Korean troops to Russia marks the next logical step in the deepening military alliance, said Mr. Gabuev, the Russia expert.

The first units of North Korean soldiers arrived in Russia’s Pacific Coast region this month on Russian Navy ships, according to South Korea’s intelligence agency. There were 3,000 North Korean soldiers on Russian soil this week, the agency said.

A video published by the Russian independent news outlet Astra this week and verified by The New York Times appears to show North Korean soldiers at a military base near Russia’s Pacific Coast.

The Russian government has denied that North Korean soldiers are present in the country, and it remains unclear what role they would play in the war with Ukraine.

Their arrival, however, underlines the reality of a nearly three-year conflict that has claimed hundreds of thousands of Russian dead and wounded, according to Western officials.

The heavy loss rates have left Russia struggling to attract enough new fighters without resorting to an economically painful and politically dangerous mobilization.

“Russia needs soldiers and is looking for them everywhere,” said Mr. Gabuev. “What this shows is that it keeps finding solutions.”

Oleg Matsnev and Arijeta Lajka contributed research.

Our Coverage of the War in Ukraine

• A Ukrainian Loan Backed by Russian Assets: The Group of 7 nations finalized a plan to give Ukraine a $50 billion loan using Russia’s frozen central bank assets, Biden administration officials said.
• A Test for China-North Korea Bonds: North Korea’s decision to dispatch troops to help Russia subdue Ukraine may put another Kremlin ally, China, in a tough spot diplomatically.
• New U.K.-Germany Defense Pact: The two governments have agreed to strengthen military cooperation and develop sophisticated weapons in a move that reflects growing concern in Europe over global security threats, particularly from Russia.

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