Flashpoints | Security | East Asia

Pyongyang’s Ukraine Gamble: What Kim Jong Un Bought With North Korean Blood

For a military that has not fought a large-scale war since 1953, experience on the Ukrainian front is tremendously valuable to North Korea.

Four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and one of the war’s stranger subplots may be its most consequential: soldiers from an Asian country with no direct stake in the conflict, and no public declaration of belligerency, are dying by the thousands on European soil, thousands of kilometers from home. 

Since October 2024, North Korea has sent an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 troops to Russia’s Kursk region, and absorbed roughly 6,000 casualties based on the intelligence estimates of South Korea and the United Kingdom. According to Ukrainian officials, North Korea may be asked to contribute tens of thousands more troops. What has Kim Jong Un bought with that blood?

North Korea’s calculus was never primarily about Ukraine, a country with which it has no border, no quarrel, and little history. It was about what Pyongyang could extract from a desperate Russia. By mid-2024, Moscow badly needed manpower and ammunition and had few partners left willing to supply either.

In June 2024, Kim and Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty in Pyongyang that included a mutual defense clause, the first of its kind for North Korea since the Cold War. Troop deployments followed within months. In return, analysts at institutions from the Council on Foreign Relations to Chatham House point to a fairly consistent list of North Korean gains: cash payments estimated in the billions of dollars, food and energy supplies for an economy that chronically struggles to feed and fuel itself, and, most significantly for Pyongyang’s long-term ambitions, technology transfers that would otherwise have been unthinkable. Russia has reportedly supplied North Korea with air defense systems, older but still capable Su-27 and MiG-29 fighters, and, more sensitively, technical assistance connected to satellite launches and naval reactor technology for submarines.

Money and hardware, however, may be less important than what North Korean soldiers are learning. South Korea’s National Intelligence Service has assessed that despite considerable losses, North Korea’s military has gained something it could not otherwise buy: live experience of drone warfare, electronic warfare, and modern combined-arms combat, together with direct exposure to Russian battlefield tactics and equipment. North Korean soldiers rotated home from the front have reportedly gone on to serve as instructors, seeding lessons from Kursk through the wider Korean People’s Army, a pattern documented in detail by 38 North. For a military that has not fought a large-scale war since 1953, that is an intelligence windfall no amount of cash could easily replicate.

There is also a domestic and dynastic logic. Framing the deployment as solidarity with Russia – Kim has publicly praised soldiers for fighting “for the fraternal Russian people” – lets Pyongyang dress a mercenary arrangement in the language of ideological alliance, useful for internal propaganda about North Korea’s rising international stature.

Before 2022, Russia and North Korea were not especially close. Moscow had, at various points, supported U.N. sanctions against Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs. The war has inverted that relationship entirely. North Korea has gone from a marginal, sanctioned pariah state to a battlefield-tested security partner that Russia now treats as an equal in a way China never has. The mutual defense treaty, the flow of advanced military technology, and Putin’s own visit to Pyongyang in 2024 all mark a qualitative shift from transactional arms sales to what Foreign Affairs described as a long-term strategic and ideological partnership.

That shift has complicated, rather than strengthened, the informal China-Russia-North Korea alignment that Western officials sometimes describe (misleadingly, most regional specialists argue) as a unified axis. 

Beijing has watched Pyongyang’s deepening entanglement with Moscow with open unease, as detailed in a Foundation for Strategic Research assessment of the evolving triangle. China has no formal say over what Russia transfers to North Korea, and reports of sensitive technology moving from Moscow to Pyongyang without Beijing’s knowledge have reportedly fed distrust between the two communist neighbors. 

Kim, for his part, has gained new leverage over Beijing: with Moscow........

© The Diplomat