Key Points and Summary on the North Korea – Russia Partnership in Ukraine: In exchange for sending tens of thousands of troops and vast amounts of artillery shells to aid Russia’s war in Ukraine, North Korea is likely demanding and receiving critical Russian military technology.
-While Pyongyang receives cash payments for its mercenaries, the real prize for Kim Jong Un is access to advanced Russian know-how that it cannot develop itself.
-This likely includes assistance with satellite technology, air defense systems, and, most alarmingly, key components for its nuclear missile program, such as atmospheric re-entry vehicle technology and sophisticated guidance systems, which have long been a stumbling block for the isolated regime.
What is Russia Giving North Korea for its Help in the Ukraine War?
North Korea is playing a growing role in the Ukraine war. In 2024, it agreed to aid the Russian invasion. It sent ten thousand soldiers to fight on the ground. It also sent Russia ammunition, particularly artillery shells. Now it appears that North Korea will send another thirty thousand men to aid Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion.
This participation is a major escalation for the North. It increasingly ties North Korea to Putin’s fate and raises the unnerving issue of what the North is receiving in return for its expanding support. The ruling Kim family is certainly willing to send its soldiers as mercenaries.
Rumor has it that North Korea is compensated $2,000 for each soldier, and the individual soldiers almost certainly will not keep that money. However, the strategically more important question is what technologies Russia might be offering to Northern help, such as space and satellite technology or air defense.
North Korea is a Good Ally for Russia
Pyongyang is an excellent alliance pick for Russia. As Russia under Putin has evolved into fascist totalitarianism, it increasingly shares values with North Korea. Both are hyper-nationalistic, repressive, belligerent, and deeply opposed to the United States’ preponderance and the liberal international order. Both countries are led by gangsters with untrammeled power and little sense of the modern requirements of national power.
In this, they differ from China. China is not nearly as repressive and dysfunctional. It recognizes that a modern economy that can compete with Western powers must be open and reasonably liberal. Although both North Korea and Russia need Chinese patronage, they are politically more similar to each other than to China.
Besides their growing political alignment, North Korea and Russia are also strategically beneficial to each other. Their alliance helps mitigate their shared, increasingly humiliating dependence on China. As the most highly militarized country in the world, North Korea constitutes a considerable pool of trained mercenaries for Russia to hire. North Korea’s military is also based on Soviet military models, as is Russia; this facilitates interoperability.
What is North Korea Receiving for Its Commitments?
North Korea’s economy is deeply dysfunctional; its elites have a taste for Western luxuries, and the Kims care little about their population’s well-being. North Korea needs dollars to buy luxury items on the black market, so renting out its soldiers to Russia as mercenaries is fitting behavior by a decadent regime.
However, more concerning is the technology transfer that North Korea is likely also demanding. Russia’s conflict in Ukraine has bogged down into a war of attrition. Putin is afraid to fully mobilize the Russian population, so hiring North Korean mercenaries is a smart move. But it does create North Korean leverage. Russia needs North Korea, at least for the moment, more than North Korea needs Russia.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un may be perceived as decadent and cruel, but he is also a crafty individual. He survived a rapid ascent to power when many thought he would face pushback from regime insiders. So Kim likely realizes that he has a brief advantage over Putin. Russian dollars are nice, but the Kims have been raising dollars through illegal schemes for decades. Far better for North Korea would be to capitalize on its temporary advantage in advanced technologies that it cannot develop itself.
We do not know what that Russian tech transfer might be. However, we can infer what North Korea would find most valuable, given the current state of its nuclear and missile programs. North Korea has struggled to develop a ‘re-entry vehicle‘—a missile warhead which can survive the heat and stress of re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. Guidance systems that ensure a missile actually lands near a designated target have also been a problem.
It is easy to imagine Kim demanding such technologies from Putin, and the more desperate Putin becomes—the longer his war in Ukraine drags on—the more it is imaginable that Putin will give up this valuable information in exchange for Pyongyang’s help on the battlefield. This alliance is paying off richly for the Kim regime.
About the Author: Dr. Robert E. Kelly
Robert E. Kelly is a professor of international relations in the Department of Political Science and Diplomacy at Pusan National University. You can follow him on X: @Robert_E_Kelly.
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Doyle
July 8, 2025 at 10:19 am
Kim jong-un is probably the ONLY leader of the axis of resistance who has a record of unblemished integrity.
Note the leaders of the other nations. They have been at the beck and call of donald trump.
Each time trump summons them on the phone, and quickly they dutifully answered. Not only that, they posed as people who think everybody is still obedient to international law.
What they’re doing is called appeasement. Or to make it sound blunt, masturbsting themselves in front of the west.
Thus the west is sneering and omaying them around the house.
But not Kim jong-un. He’s not interested in appeasement, neither is he interested in touching his body parts for the sake of western audience.
Instead, he has led his country tobsurge ahead far out in front despite all the crippling, near-fatal sanctions imposed by the west.
North korea has shown What it’s like to properly present oneself to the west. Which is a bunch of two-horned devils.
Face them like a steel-spiked porcupine.
pagar
July 8, 2025 at 1:58 pm
What should north Korea asks from Russia. Today.
North Korea, today, in 2025, has only one very good very relevant request for Moscow to fulfil.
Send a ‘status-6’ underwater nuclear torpedo drone to the eastern coast of Taiwan and blammm…explode it.
The whole world will then be able to fully watch a live show unfolding in realtime depicting two major powers struggling and elbowing each other in a race to reach (and grab) the island.
All the damned stupid fake masks of holy sanctity and fake self-righteousness will fall and drop away as speedily as the north wind howling during deep winter.
The truth can’t be hidden.