North Korea–Russia relations

• 1. Introduction

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  North Korea-Russia relations stretch back to a moment in 1945 when Soviet troops crossed into the Japanese colony of Korea, dividing a peninsula and setting two nations on a course that would define the Cold War in Asia. The Soviet Union did not just occupy northern Korea; it chose its leader, installed Kim Il Sung as first secretary of the North Korean Branch Bureau of the Communist Party in December 1945, and then stood by as the nation it created went to war against the south. What began as patron and client became something far more complicated: a relationship marked by ideological friction, cycles of estrangement, and, in the 2020s, a military partnership that reversed decades of Russian opposition to North Korean nuclear ambitions. How did the country that once condemned Pyongyang's missile tests come to call denuclearization a closed issue? And what does the deployment of North Korean troops to the battlefields of Kursk reveal about how far this alliance has traveled?

• 2. Building a State

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  Soviet troops arrived in Korea under an agreement that drew the 38th parallel as the boundary between Moscow's zone and Washington's. North Korea came under the Soviet Civil Administration and People's Committee of North Korea from 1945 to 1948, with Kim Il Sung rising under the effective authority of Soviet General Terentii Shtykov. On the 10th of July 1948, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea was officially proclaimed, and on the 12th of October the Soviet Union recognized the DPRK as the sovereign government of the entire peninsula, including the south. Archival evidence later indicated that the decision to invade South Korea in 1950 was Kim's initiative, not Moscow's. Soviet intelligence had reportedly obtained information on limits in U.S. atomic stockpiles and defense cuts, which led Stalin to believe the Truman administration would not intervene. The Soviet 64th Fighter Aviation Corps provided North Korea and China with pilots during the war. By the time the fighting ended, ninety-three North Korean factories had been built with Russian technical assistance, forging the country's heavy-industrial backbone.

• 3. Asserting Independence

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  Kim Il Sung did not remain a compliant client for long. In 1956, at the 2nd Plenary Session of the 3rd Central Committee, a group of pro-China Korean figures known as the Yan'an faction attempted to unseat Kim with support from both Beijing and Moscow, in what became known as the August faction incident. A joint Soviet-Chinese delegation co-headed by Anastas Mikoyan and Peng Dehuai was dispatched to Pyongyang in September 1956 to instruct Kim to stop any purge and reinstate the faction's leaders; Kim backed down only partially. That same year, Kim rejected Nikita Khrushchev's program of de-Stalinization. The Soviet embassy began pressing Kim to relinquish either his party leadership or his role as premier. Kim proposed his ally Choe Yong-gon as a possible successor to one post, then by 1957 advised the embassy against appointing him. Soviet ambassador Alexander Puzanov ultimately did not push hard in a personal meeting with Kim, and Kim simply ignored Soviet advice and stayed on as premier. The Soviet Union did not intervene. During the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s, North Korea played both powers off each other while favoring autonomy from both; after Leonid Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev in 1964, relations with Moscow warmed again, underpinned by the 1961 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance.

• 4. Drift and Estrangement

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  Mikhail Gorbachev's rise shifted the calculus. After 1985, Moscow began reducing aid to the North in favor of reconciliation with South Korea. Military equipment continued to flow until a final batch of MiG-29s was delivered in 1989. Kim Il Sung visited the USSR five times as General Secretary, the last time in 1986 during the early Gorbachev era; his last encounter with Leonid Brezhnev had been at the funeral of Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito in May 1980. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the new Russian government under Boris Yeltsin turned decisively toward Seoul. Kim Jong Il was so skeptical of Moscow's intentions that when Deputy Premier Vitali Ignatenko visited in spring 1996 carrying a personal message from Yeltsin, Kim did not even send a letter of reply. He had been waiting for Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov to win the coming June-July 1996 presidential election. At the peak of the Soviet-era bilateral relationship in 1988, roughly 60% of North Korea's trade had been with Moscow; by the mid-1990s Russia was delivering humanitarian aid instead, including food and medicine worth 4.5 billion old rubles in the fall of 1997 and 370 tonnes of sugar, canned meat, fish, and milk worth 3.5 billion rubles in December of that year.

• 5. Putin and the Reset

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  Vladimir Putin's elevation to prime minister in August 1999 and then president in March 2000 opened a new chapter. Kim Jong Il's references to Putin were to the effect that Russia at last had a leader with whom to do business. Covert preparations for a presidential visit to Pyongyang began in April 2000, and the first summit in the history of Russian-Korean relations took place in July of that year when a Joint Declaration was signed. It was the first international document Kim Jong Il signed as General Secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea. North Korea's nuclear program tested the relationship: Russia supported United Nations Security Council Resolution 1695 condemning the 2006 North Korean missile test, voted for Resolution 1718 imposing an arms embargo, and after a nuclear test on the 25th of May 2009, Russia's Foreign Ministry described it as a "serious blow" to the nonproliferation regime. By 2012 both sides were engineering a financial reset: on the 18th of September 2012 Russia and North Korea signed a deal to write off 90% of North Korea's debt, estimated at roughly $11 billion, with the remaining $1 billion to finance Russian investment in humanitarian and energy projects. Putin ratified the agreement on the 5th of May 2014 after the State Duma and Federation Council approved it. In April 2019, Kim Jong Un traveled by armored train to Vladivostok to meet Putin for the first time, requesting help in resolving a nuclear stalemate with the United States.

• 6. War and Alliance

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  Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine fundamentally rewrote the relationship. On the 2nd of March, North Korea was among only five countries to vote against a United Nations resolution condemning the invasion. North Korea became the third country to recognize the independence of the breakaway Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics; Ukraine terminated diplomatic ties in response. By September 2022, reporting cited by U.S. intelligence officials indicated Russia was purchasing millions of artillery shells and rockets from North Korea to sustain its invasion. Kim Jong Un visited the Vostochny Cosmodrome in the Amur Oblast in September 2023, where Putin is widely understood to have been seeking North Korea's large stockpiles of Soviet-era ammunition; when asked whether Russia would help North Korea build satellites, Putin said "that's why they came here." A new shipping route linking the Port of Najin and the Port of Dunay was established in June 2024. South Korean Defense Minister Shin Wonsik alleged his ministry had detected at least 10,000 shipping containers moved from North Korea to Russia. In July 2024, a DPRK weapons system that included the Bulsae-4 anti-tank guided missile was seen destroying a British-supplied AS-90 self-propelled artillery system in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine. On the 28th of April 2025, the North Korean government confirmed the deployment of 14,000 troops to the Russian front; the United Kingdom estimated that DPRK forces had suffered more than 6,000 killed and wounded as of June 2025.

• 7. The 2024 Treaty and Its Terms

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  Putin's June 2024 visit to Pyongyang, his first since 2000, produced the North Korean-Russian Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. The treaty pledged mutual aid and cooperation in security, trade, and cultural ties, along with a mutual defence clause. Putin expressed appreciation for North Korea's support of Russia's military actions in Ukraine; Kim Jong Un declared "full support" and pledged stronger strategic ties with Moscow. Russia dropped its long-standing opposition to North Korea's nuclear program: in September 2024, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov described denuclearization of North Korea as a "closed issue." By July 2025, Lavrov said Russia "respects North Korea's aspirations" regarding its nuclear program, and in February 2026, he argued that North Korea's possession of nuclear weapons had become, in his phrasing, "the main guarantee of prosperity in the modern world." The treaty was formalized in November 2024. That same month, Kim Jong Un met Russian Minister of Natural Resources Alexander Kozlov in Pyongyang for the 11th intergovernmental cooperation committee. In February 2025, a senior North Korean Politburo member, Ri Hi Yong, visited Moscow to sign a protocol on inter-party cooperation between United Russia and the Workers' Party of Korea, and met Putin directly on the 27th of February.

• 8. Workers, Borders, and Trade

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  Intelligence sources in South Korea estimated that over 10,000 North Korean workers were sent to Russia in 2024, with the total expected to exceed 50,000. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin said in September 2022 they were working on arrangements for North Korean workers, possibly 20,000 to 50,000, to develop infrastructure in Russia's Far East. Official Russian data showed a sharp rise in North Korean arrivals, with thousands entering on student visas to circumvent sanctions. Workers described conditions to the BBC of more than 18 hours of work per day, minimal rest, inadequate safety equipment, overcrowded accommodations in shipping containers or unfinished buildings, and wages withheld until return to North Korea with most earnings transferred to the state as loyalty fees. The shared border along the lower Tumen River runs only 17 km, formed in 1860 when Tsar Alexander II acquired Ussuriland from Qing dynasty China in the Convention of Peking. That border gained infrastructure in 2025: on the 1st of February, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin signed decree no. 157 authorizing construction of a road bridge. Both sides connected on the 21st of April 2026, with an opening set for the 19th of June. Governor Oleg Kozhemyako of Primorsky region said the bridge would cut the distance between Vladivostok and the North Korean border city of Rason to 320 kilometres. On the 28th of July 2025, the first commercial flight between the two countries in decades launched from Moscow to Pyongyang.