Autor: Reuben F. Johnson

Why The Plane Came From Moscow

Last year the NKNews.org site that is dedicated to monitoring activity in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) reported an unusual event. The site records almost any development in the DPRK, sometimes actions or occurrences that even seem trivial or unspectacular. These can be movements around one of the palaces of Kim Jong-un or signs of longer than normal queues at petrol stations or which foreign companies have attended a trade fair in Pyongyang. These are the normal kind of indicators that intelligence analysts will use as if they are piecing together a puzzle so they can then formulate a hypothesis as to their implications.

But on 26 August of last year what took place required very little imagination or interpretation. A Tupolev Tu-154 VIP passenger aircraft painted in Russian government livery took off from Vladivostok airport shortly after 0700 and landed in Pyongyang two hours later. This was the second flight of this type to take place that August with both carrying what was reported as a senior Russian trade delegation. Both flights had also originated in Moscow – the time on the ground in Vladivostok, the easternmost major city in Russia, was just a stopover.

This was another in a series of interactions between Russia and the DPRK that demonstrated a continuously increasing level of cooperation between the two nations. It also took place at a time when it became clear that there was a new dynamic to the two nations’ relationship. At this point Moscow had already been receiving massive deliveries of munitions and other military assistance from Pyongyang. These shipments were desperately needed by Russian President Vladimir Putin due to his inability to sustain the war on Ukraine. The DPRK was literally coming to his rescue.

After more than two and a half years of war, Putin’s military had been consuming artillery rounds and other materiel at a rate that was well above the normal production tempo of Russia’s domestic ammunition suppliers. Going back to close to a year after Moscow’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Kim Jong-un and his munitions plants are what had saved the Russian President from the humiliation of having to retreat and admit his invasion of Ukraine was a failure.

Between August 2023 and February 2024, there had been 25 or more visits by cargo vessels to the DPRK port of Najin for the primary purpose of loading up munitions to be delivered to Russia. There were also movements by at least 19 of what are called “shadow vessels” or “dark vessels” – so named because their Automatic Identification System (AIS) receivers had been switched off to avoid them from being tracked or geolocated. Subsequent to disabling their transponders, those ships visited Vostochny Port in Russia to both unload and load these containers. These deliveries from the DPRK are singularly responsible in compensating for those shortfalls and keeping the one-time KGB Lt. Col.’s war machine alive.

In an interview in June 2024 for Time magazine, the ROK defence minister, Shin Wonsik, estimated that up to that point in 2024, some 10,000 shipping containers had been transferred to Russia.  Those containers, he stated, were loaded with up to 4.8 million artillery shells. In addition to these artillery rounds, Pyongyang also shipped dozens of the Hwasong-11A (KN-23) model single-stage, solid fuel, short range ballistic missiles (SRBM) to Russia. The shipment of these missiles was not immediately detected, and their existence was only made known after they were fired against Ukrainian cities. The DPRK was verified as being the point of manufacture by inspections of partially-intact fragments of the missiles that remained after their impact. These shipments have not only rescued the Russian military from defeat on the battlefield, but the SRBMs are what has enabled Putin to enlarge this war against Ukrainian cities that has been steadily escalating in the past two years. Just as DPRK artillery rounds and other types of ammunition are all that has kept the Russian Army from having to withdraw back onto their side of the border. The Hwasong missiles have compensated for Russia being unable to build enough of their own SRBMs – a weapon being increasingly used to terrorise Ukrainian cities and their civilian populations. It was not until the July 2024 NATO summit in Washington, DC that the DPRK and Iran were both finally called out and accused of “fueling” the Russian destruction of Ukraine and for providing the “direct military support” that permits Putin to prosecute this war. NATO member states specifically singled out Pyongyang for supplying “artillery shells and ballistic missiles” to the Russian military.

 

Moscow and Pyongyang’s Expanding Relationship

There are of course non-ideological motivations and tangible benefits for the regime of Kim Jong-un continuing this munitions trade with Russia. The hard currency or the Chinese RMB or the illegal oil shipments that Moscow provides as payment have been an unanticipated windfall for Pyongyang. Being Putin’s badly-needed ammunition lifeline in a war Russia’s military was ill-equipped to sustain is just what the cash-poor DPRK desperately needed. But last October when Kim decided to blow up the remaining bridges and roads connecting it with the ROK was not simply because the Kremlin had become a convenient and reliable cash cow.

This was a symbolic step of what appeared to be severing all possibilities of a rapprochement with the ROK. But there is a concrete “Plan B” that Kim is now implementing. Functioning as Putin’s quartermaster in the present day is a lucrative side business, but a larger strategic relationship with Russia is his ultimate goal. And it is this objective of a long-term cooperation with Russia that has caused Kim to take the step of moving closer to Moscow and abandoning any pretense of increasing his engagements with Seoul.

In the process he has made two calculations. One is that in these desperate circumstances Russia will now be forced to transfer more than just money and oil to Kim and his family-run regime. The DPRK will also receive numerous more advanced weapon systems and the technological know-how to build them on its own. This access – these defence industrial “keys to the kingdom” – have been sought after by Pyongyang for many years but have been held back off-limits by Russia until now. These are weapon systems that Russia of the past either would not supply to Kim’s regime due to obligations under international conventions or because the North Korean regime was unwilling to pay the price for acquiring this technology or over concerns that in the hands of the DPRK those military-technical capabilities might not be used responsibly.

The second is the potential for modernising the DPRK’s military machine that a strategic partnership with Russia presents. This is worth far more than the short-term financial gain of selling artillery rounds or providing soldiers that will go and fight for Moscow on the front lines in Ukraine.

The short list of those capabilities that could transform the effectiveness of Kim’s military almost overnight is:

1. Modern-day, 4th or 4+ generation fighter aircraft – The Korean People’s Army (KPA) Air Force is one of the oldest in the world. The most modern of the models they operate are early configurations of the Mikoyan MiG-29 that are more than 30 years old. Moscow has promised to provide later-model MiG-29 and Sukhoi Su-27 models to field a more credible force structure.
2. Detailed capabilities in stealth fighter aircraft configuration and design – The DPRK’s southern neighbour, the ROK, is equipped with some of the most advanced models of the US F-16 and F-15 fighters, plus the stealthy F-35. The DPRK wants to even the balance of power by having the ability to penetrate ROK radar networks in the same manner as the F-35. 
3. Next-generation main battle tanks – The KPA has recently revealed a modern design that is closer to the Russian T-14 generation, but many of the army’s in-service platforms are becoming obsolete. The armored vehicle force needs an injection of technology not unlike that of the Air Force.
4. Nuclear propulsion systems for submarines – The DPRK is building its own submarine which it intends to be equipped with a nuclear propulsion system. It requires assistance to develop the reactor.
5. Satellite and the photo-reconnaissance and communications that go with them – The DPRK requires satellite systems for its own infrastructure, communications and photo reconnaissance requirements. Most of the satellite launches by the DPRK to date have failed.
6. Ballistic missile design methodologies – The DPRK’s IRBM programme lacks the ability to design missiles that can actually survive the re-entry and terminal phase and can actually hit a target on dry land.

These and other tech-transfer projects were some of the agenda items when Kim and Putin met for a June 2024 summit in Pyongyang, where they signed a mutual defence pact and other agreements. “I think this is the biggest threat emanating from the Korean Peninsula since the Korean War,” Victor Cha, the senior vice president for Asia and the Korea chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, commented after the summit between the two had taken place. 

The assessment Kim had made regarding these technologies being on Russia’s “not-for export” list for decades out of concerns for the consequences associated with their proliferation were correct. But Kim was again also correct in concluding that these long-held restrictions were now being lifted due to the desperate spot that the Russian President and former KGB Lt. Col. finds himself in.

Almost a year earlier in September 2023 Kim had visited the Russian Far East and received guided VIP tours of the major defence plants in the region. He had been accompanied by senior Russian defence officials, including Russia’s Minister for Trade and Industry (MinTorgProm) Denys Manturov. It was here that he finished composing the “shopping list” of defence tech he and Putin discussed in their meeting nine months later.

It bears mentioning that Manturov and Rostec General Director Sergei Chemezov are the two individuals who sit at the top of and make all the decisions affecting the Russian defence industrial sector. Chemezov’s Rostec has controlling interests in almost every major defence industrial enterprise in Russia – 248 in total. Rostec is also the entity in charge of RosOboronExport (ROE), the Russia state arms export and import monopoly. Rostec itself is legally defined as “The State Corporation for Facilitation of Development, Production and Export of High-Technological Industrial Output”. It is a monstrous administrative apparatus which does not actually produce anything in the form of a manufactured product but as has been reported multiple times, “does control staggering financial flows.”

Chemezov himself wields enormous power due to his almost four decades-long association with Putin, a relationship which dates back to when they were both KGB officers assigned to the same station in Dresden in the Former German Democratic Republic (GDR). The two even lived in the same apartment block along with other Soviet and East German Stasi functionaries. In the unwritten and unofficial list of the most influential functionaries in today’s Russia, his place is at the highest level as a member of what is called Putin’s “off the books” Politburo. 

It is therefore, not much of a surprise that the 26 August 2024 delegation travelled to Pyongyang from Moscow – but via Vladivostok – an airport in that same region of Russia that is home to the defence plants that had been visited by Kim almost a year earlier. The fact it was not a direct flight from Moscow could have been due to the Tu-154M not having the range to fly from the Russian capital to Pyongyang without refueling. But what is more likely is that it is because the defence enterprises the DPRK was looking to source technology transfer from are also located in that Far East region.

For this reason, this aeroplane is thought to have made the stopover in Vladivostok to collect up the heads of those defence firms that the DPRK ruler had visited in the Russian Far East. They were then added to the delegation of MinTorgProm officials, the heads of the major defence industrial holding firms (OAK, KRET, KRTV, etc.) and the ever-present Rostec and Rosoboronexport functionaries that were already on board and had flown in from Moscow that morning.

 

What Makes The Partnership So Convenient For Both

Almost any other nation would hesitate to provide Russia with this level of military assistance and engage in such defence trade. Any trade with Moscow of this nature guarantees being hit with secondary sanctions. But the DPRK is already so heavily sanctioned that it suffers few consequences for now becoming a major supplier to Moscow.

Pyongyang is now reportedly expanding production in some of its munition plants from 50 per cent or less of their capacity to full-scale operations in order to supply Russia’s military. In other instances, there are even new production lines being established in the DPRK. The map above shows the number of factories now either partially or completely dedicated to these Russian contracts. The situation for the DPRK is roughly the same with the thousands of Shahed suicide drones being supplied to Russia by Iran. The threat of additional sanctions creates little concern with the Iranian government or the IRGC, which is the primary beneficiary of much of the burgeoning military business with Russia.

One of the consequences of supplying Russia with a steady stream of the implements of war is additional sanctions that can be imposed by the US and EU. But given the sanctions regime that the DPRK already lives under, this is of little to no concern to Kim. The DPRK is in the same situation as Iran, which is receiving large infusions of cash from Moscow in exchange for this weaponry. Tehran is also receiving some of its payment in the form of transfers of sophisticated defence technologies to support ballistic missile programmes, a complete satellite surveillance system and nuclear weapons research materials.

What Moscow was expecting to receive from this sizeable industrial archipelago, and the items that Russian defence enterprises would have to provide in return, would be the main subjects for those who were on-board that 26 August flight to Pyongyang. But that delegation’s visit and their deliberations was not the last major interaction between senior Russian defence officials and their counterparts in the DPRK.

On 29 November 2024 news channels all reported a previously-unannounced and unscheduled official visit to Pyongyang by Russian Defence Minister Andrei Belousov. His arrival was feted with a red carpet, military honour guard and brass band welcoming ceremony on the airport tarmac. Once on the ground the Russian Defence Minister stated that military cooperation between the countries is expanding and applauded the strategic partnership agreement that had been signed by Putin and Kim Jong-un following their June meeting in Pyongyang. Belousov’s trip to the DPRK appears to have been organised at least partially as a tit-for-tat response to a visit a few days prior in Seoul between then-South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and a Ukrainian delegation led by Defence Minister Rustem Umerov. The ROK head of state called for the two countries to formulate countermeasures in response to the DPRK’s transfer of thousands of troops to Russia to support Putin’s war against Ukraine. “The Russian defense minister doesn’t visit North Korea just to celebrate bilateral ties,” Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul, told the AP the day of Belousov’s arrival in Pyongyang. “This visit indicates Putin and Kim’s military cooperation in violation of international law is about to increase further.”

 

What is the Future for The Partnership

The question then is why Russia, one of the world’s largest militarised economies, has found it necessary to resort to extreme measures to then establish a wartime economy. The answer is the Russian defence production system was not working and has not functioned properly for some time. This is why after a more than three-year war in Ukraine Putin’s Army is failing in its objectives and running out of not just munitions, but also personnel and military vehicles. This dilemma is largely an end product of what has been characterised as “decades of chronic underfunding in the scientific sector” – both military and civilian. Steps being taken to remedy this situation are now creating new institutional centres of power within Russia that in turn strengthen the cooperation with the DPRK.

Part of what has held the Russian defence sector together and has made some of Russia’s wealthiest oligarchs even wealthier is that the West’s strategy of imposing sanctions on Russia as punishment for the invasion of Ukraine has failed to have the desired negative impact on defence production. The billionaires themselves are all under Western sanctions, but the companies that they control – in many cases chemical enterprises involved in the production of essential inputs for manufacturing explosives – have largely escaped major financial sanctions or embargos on their import of critical goods from the USA or the European Union. These are just some of the mechanisms for skirting and evading sanctions that the DPRK have proven to be so adept at over the years. The two countries now find themselves in a situation where they are both close to being equally isolated from the world’s trade and financial networks.

It is not by chance that when prominent Russian scholars discuss potential future scenarios for the country that they predict this isolation to continue for years. They describe what Russia will look like as “visualise the biggest version of a North Korea that you could ever imagine.” Putting both nations a parallel pariah status will undoubtedly serve to strengthen their cooperation and to increase their dependency on one another. But, not all the problems Russia has in prosecuting the war in Ukraine can be resolved by relying on the DPRK to keep supplying the weapons and munitions that Moscow requires.

Conditions within the ranks of Russia’s military itself are deteriorating worse than they are in the industrial sector. There are now documented cases in which Russian armoured columns of 100 vehicles were moving towards an enemy position, but many failed to reach their objective. This is because before they even came within range of the Ukrainian positions, 38 of those vehicles stopped and their crews abandoned them before they made any contact with the enemy. These are not cases of running out of petrol or a mechanical failure of some kind. There are no coincidences on the battlefield, in the words of one former US special forces operative. “These are people who do not want to fight. Falling morale within the Russian military is not a problem at this point,” he continued. “It is a cancer.”

Russia is also completely maxed out in its failed effort to subdue Ukraine. It is estimated that 95 per cent of resources are tied up in this effort. There are no reserves – either human resources or equipment – left to mobilise. But even with this massive dedication of men and materiel the results are almost inconsequential. In one recent action the Russian military lost 60,000 men in one series of engagements. Their accomplishment for that scale of combat losses was capturing an area that is approximately the size of downtown Phoenix, Arizona.

Within the ranks of the Russian senior officer corps, you also find no brilliant commanders who can pull off a miraculous reversal of the situation like a George Patton when he commanded Third Army in WWII or a Matthew Ridgway when he was handed the command of all forces in Korea at the low point in the conflict and when all was thought to be lost. “It requires about 30 years to make a general in the US military,” explained the same former US special operations officer. “But the character and makeup of the Russian Army is such that a general in that system is not an experienced leader but is instead a 30-year con man or scam artist.”

Given this situation with both troop numbers, ammunition, morale and compromised leadership, Russia will have no choice but to keep turning to Pyongyang as its main solution for its military’s shortcomings. It will also have to keep providing the DPRK with the weapons know-how that Kim desires to receive from Russia. It is a poisonous, dangerous combination that only promises to become worse.

 

Conclusion

In the 1990s after the collapse of the USSR the great nightmare of those who had detailed knowledge of the massive Soviet defence industrial sector came down to one word: proliferation. The economy of the new and independent Russia was collapsing. Senior designers of the most deadly weapons ever produced in the Soviet era presided over teams of specialists and engineers who had not been paid wages for months. Many of them did not know where their next bag of potatoes was coming from.

Russia was awash in highly skilled technical specialists who were well-versed in the technology of nuclear weapons design, ballistic missile and rocket motor technology, bioweapons, advanced guidance systems – and a thousand other disciplines in the weapons design and defence industrial sector. These were, unfortunately, the specific defence technologies that list of the world’s more troublesome and dangerous nations – Iran and the DPRK being at the top of the list – would do anything to get their hands on.

Fortunately for the western alliance and other friendly nations, the great migration of Russian weapons designers never assumed the dimensions that were once so feared, but the DPRK did acquire nuclear weapons nonetheless. What it lacks today are the delivery systems and conventional weapon systems that any military establishment would need in order to properly leverage their ownership of a nuclear device.

Sadly, the cornucopia of defence technology that decades we were afraid a nation of penniless and starving Russians would hand over to the DPRK – among others – is now going to be handed over by a nation of Russians enduring a different manner of starvation. Starvation for a lack of conventional, battlefield munitions, starvation for a lack of armoured vehicles, starvation for a lack of enough ground troops.

This growing alliance between Moscow and Pyongyang is the most alarming development to occur on the Korean peninsula since the Cold War. All of the nations in the region plus their security partners like the US are all going to have to face the challenge of what may end up being a greatly-modernized KPA. Many of the advantages over the KPA due to areas of technological inferiority that the US-ROK battleplans have assumed could be taken advantage of in the event of a conflict will eventually no longer be there to be exploited.

 

Recommendations

Given these eventual consequences of this growing Russia-DPRK alliance and trade in weapons technology there are steps that could be taken to mitigate or retard the increasing instability and threats to the security situation on the peninsula and in the region.

1. One would be a formalized set of security guarantees, increased military-military cooperation, training exercises, sharing of intelligence, joint naval and air patrols and other measures to maximize the military resources available in the event of a confrontation with the DPRK. Another would be measures taken to clamp down further on the many activities that the DPRK engage in to circumvent the sanctions that are designed to prevent the development of their WMD capabilities and the financial means they require to create them in the first place.
2. Another issue is the inputs that the DPRK requires in order to produce such a large volume of explosive weaponry. Among other chemical substances required is nitrocellulose, one of the key ingredients in making gunpowder. Another is ammonium perchlorate (NH4ClO4), which is one of the primary compounds necessary for the production of solid rocket fuel. One of the actions the US and others have taken is to target those networks procuring these critical inputs – an activity that must be expanded.
3. A more difficult task is to disrupt the ability of some of the DPRK’s traditional benefactors in Beijing to continue to support the nation. They have provided all manner of economic assistance and have continued to also trade with Pyongyang in violation of applicable sanctions that they are deliberately ignoring, It is extremely difficult to modify their behaviour in any way, but to the extent that their activities in this regard can be given more publicity it is possible to exert more pressure on the PRC to comply with existing sanctions regimes.
4. More important would be any steps that could be taken to cut off the supply of the most critical item in the DPRK’s defence production processes. According to an analysis by the UK-based Conflict Armament Research (CAR), 90 percent of the electronic components recovered from the unexploded and remaining fragments of North Korean missiles used by Russia originated from 26 companies in eight countries. The United States accounted for the largest share at 75.5 percent, followed by Germany at 11.9 percent, Singapore at 3.4 percent, and Japan at 3.1 percent. Most of these parts were produced between 2021 and 2023. This is the same problem that has already been seen in Ukraine with examinations of intact sections of Russian and Iranian weaponry also loaded with US and other foreign-made components. The ROK needs to send a very clear message to Washington that the US agencies responsible for those electronic components not reaching the DPRK are failing in their mission.
5. Generally, the formula regarding sanctions and embargoes is the same as stated earlier this year by Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, US President Donald Trump’s Special Envoy for Russia and Ukraine when he was discussing the current sanctions regime against Russia by the US and its allies. The sanctions as they exist on paper would be tabulated as about a “6 out of 10” in terms of their severity. Making those sanctions even less effective is that, as he explained, their enforcement is a tepid “3 out of 10.” Until the sanctions as they are intended and signed off on paper and the sanctions as implemented are mirror images of one another, official efforts to obstruct the DPRK’s expanding defence production will continue to be inadequate.

 

Author: Reuben F. Johnson 

Director of Asia Research Centre, Korea Fellow

Casimir Pulaski Foundation

 

Supported by the Korea Foundation