Top Ukrainian defense officials and U.S. diplomats agree about one thing: North Korean arms deliveries to Russia are among the biggest threats to Kyiv’s ability to defeat the Russian invasion.
Lt. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, the Ukrainian chief of military intelligence, has called the nonstop ammunition shipments from North Korea to Russian ports in the Far East a direct threat to the Ukrainian front lines thousands of miles to the west. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the United Nations Security Council last month that addressing North Korean (and Iranian) arms deliveries to Russia should be the first priority for the U.N. body. And U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told lawmakers this spring that weapons from countries such as North Korea helped to keep Russia’s war going.
The denunciations of North Korean assistance for Moscow’s war effort, which has been apparent for two years, have redoubled after the signing this summer of a rejuvenated Russia-North Korea defense pact.
There is plenty of open-source evidence suggesting that, since at least mid-2022, thousands of shipping containers have left North Korean ports, docked in Russia, and offloaded to trains headed west. U.S. State Department analysts say that at least 11,000 containers have arrived, apparently carrying munitions. Budanov has noted that the results are visible on the battlefield about a week after a new shipment arrives. While estimates of the exact number of North Korean artillery shells delivered vary widely, from 1.6 million to almost 6 million shells, experts say at least 2 million were sent to Russia as of this summer, though many of them were old, degraded, or defective in some way.
That raises a couple of questions: Why would the delivery of old and often unreliable North Korean artillery ammunition over the past year constitute one of the biggest threats to Ukraine’s chances in a war fought by advanced tanks, fighter jets, drones, and air-defense systems? And just what is North Korea getting out of this trade—merely money, food, and oil, or is it also receiving advanced Russian military technology that could further empower dictator Kim Jong Un?
In other words, will the more worrisome impact of Moscow and Pyongyang’s newfound partnership be seen on the battlefields of eastern Ukraine, or in the geopolitical landscape of Northeast Asia?
The shells that North Korea has provided Russia are not top of the line (though, neither were all of the rounds provided to Ukrainian forces from a hodgepodge of Western stockpiles). Experts who have analyzed a number of mortar and artillery rounds used in the war have found many munitions that are either old, degraded, or simply defective, with high dud rates and unreliable targeting.
“This is not high-quality ordnance, but this is not the first place Russia would like to go” for extra supplies, said Vann Van Diepen, a former U.S. State Department official and an expert on North Korean weapons proliferation. Without it, though, the Russian way of fighting would be hard to sustain, especially into the third year of what was meant to be a lightning war, he said.
“They’d have to do it at a much lower level of intensity, because their way of seizing territory is big artillery barrages and then moving in,” Van Diepen added.
That’s the reason that vast amounts of even poor-quality arms are such a concern for Ukrainian military leaders and the U.S. officials desperate to help them stay in the fight. Russia has sought to increase its own domestic production of munitions, especially artillery shells, but it still can’t produce enough to meet the high rates of fire that its forces need.
Especially over the past year, when Russian factories were still gearing up, North Korean deliveries “gave them the bridging capacity. North Korean artillery shells are not good, but when it comes to artillery munitions, quantity has a quality all of its own,” said Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Kofman estimated that North Korean deliveries may have provided a significant number of the shells that came out of Russian barrels over that critical year, which “has allowed Russia to sustain an artillery fire advantage” of at least 3-to-1, and higher in some areas, over Ukrainian forces, he said.
That kind of edge has been especially notable in tough fighting in southeastern Ukraine over the past year as the United States and Europe have fallen short on their own pledges to boost production of artillery ammunition to supply Ukrainian forces. On Oct. 2, Russian forces finally battered the Ukrainian town of Vuhledar into submission after two years of resistance, potentially opening the door to further territorial gains for Moscow.
The other big question is what North Korea is getting out of the bargain, beyond the shipments of food and energy that the isolated regime badly needs, particularly after the economic devastation of the COVID-19 years and the continued impact of Western and U.N. sanctions.
One obvious win for Pyongyang was Russia’s blocking at the United Nations this spring of the renewal of the body that oversees sanctions enforcement against North Korea’s missile and nuclear programs; shuttering that oversight program after 15 years in operation will likely make it even easier for North Korea to skirt the sanctions meant to curb its ability to develop a long-range nuclear strike capability.
Another high-profile win was the inking in June of the Russia-North Korea defense pact, essentially an updated version of a similar agreement dating from the 1960s between the Soviet Union and the then-nascent North Korea.
Some experts believe that the pact offers less than meets the eye, given that Russian involvement in any North Korean war is unlikely.
But the formalized military relationship between the two countries, coming two years after the start of intensified arms shipments to aid Russia’s war, has redoubled alarm in Washington about the emergence of a durable coalition of anti-Western countries, including China and Iran. That informal grouping has featured greater trade and arms transfers among all four members, which have had impacts both on the Ukrainian battlefield and farther afield; Russia is reportedly considering whether to supply Iranian proxy forces in Yemen with advanced missiles to further disrupt shipping in the Red Sea.
Potentially much more worrisome, but much harder to pin down, is the extent to which Russia is willing to provide North Korea with advanced military technology. This has been a worry for the Biden White House since well before the new mutual defense pact. The administration is particularly concerned about the transfer of fighter jets, tanks, and missile technology, though Moscow has been supplying Pyongyang with missile technology for decades. (And, in fact, the few dozen North Korean missiles used in Russian attacks on Ukraine this year appeared to be direct copies or derivatives of older Soviet designs.)
Since the deepening of the arms trade between the two countries has become apparent, analysts have sought to determine which of the many items on Pyongyang’s wish list might be on offer from Russia, including satellite technology, guidance systems for missiles, delivery systems for intercontinental-ballistic missiles, and even advanced submarine technology.
“What is North Korea getting out of this? We just don’t know. The Russians haven’t actually said they have given much of anything,” Van Diepen said. “There is no real, solid information beyond the food and oil. In terms of military tech transfers, there is no actual information.”
The question is complicated, because while North Korea’s wish list may be grand, its needs are even greater. Unlike China, which is also hoping to benefit from its support for Russia’s war with long-denied transfers of advanced technology, almost any technology is advanced for North Korea.
“North Korea could benefit from all sorts of things, not just nuclear technology. They have vast needs in the conventional arms area, in dual-use technologies—they could benefit from just about anything,” Van Diepen said.
One big fear is that the refurbished relationship between Pyongyang and Moscow could embolden Kim to take an even more aggressive line regionally than he has in recent years. Since the demise of bilateral talks with the United States in 2019, Kim gave signs of jettisoning decades of family preference for a normalization of relations with the United States based on denuclearization, said Rachel Minyoung Lee, a Korea expert at the Stimson Center. That became even clearer with a late 2023 speech by Kim in which he defined South Korea as essentially a foreign country with which North Korea is in belligerent relations.
“All this happened in the middle of this blossoming relationship with the Russians, so it would be logical to assume Russia was in the background of Kim’s decision-making,” Lee said.
And there’s another thing beyond food, oil, or technology that Kim could get from Russia: a veneer of international legitimacy. One of the little-noticed clauses in the June mutual defense pact, Lee noted, was Russia’s support to help get North Korea into international clubs such as BRICS, a grouping of countries (comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and several recently added members) that is turning into an ad hoc anti-Western coalition.
The deeper relationship with Russia might also give Kim a chance to resuscitate one of his grandfather’s favorite plays: balancing China and Russia against each other. China dominates North Korea’s trade and has acted as a check of sorts on Pyongyang’s worst foreign-policy excesses. Closer ties with and backing from Moscow could give Kim space to indulge a more adventurous foreign policy.
“At least for the short term, it makes sense for Kim to align more closely with Russia, because Russia is not going to worry about international sanctions or international norms, and China will not quite go that far,” Lee said.
The problem is that, unlike in Kim Il Sung’s days, China is not a junior partner to be balanced against. China’s economic dominance over Russia has already become apparent in the terms of those two countries’ so-called “no limits” friendship, and it is Beijing that holds Moscow over a barrel. That new power dynamic could ultimately act as a brake on just how much Russian support can help drive North Korea in a dangerous direction, Lee said.
“I think China is mixed: They’re not unhappy that Russia and North Korea are creating further headaches for Washington, but they are also concerned about how far this could go, and about a waning of the influence they have over North Korea,” she said.
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