COMMENTARY: North Korea is learning war in Moscow — and sending Seoul the bill

Introduction: a dictatorship alliance that is reshaping the Asian threat

What the North Korean deployment means beyond the Ukrainian front

Since the fall of 2024, North Korea has sent between 14,000 and 15,000 soldiers to fight alongside Russian forces in Russia and near Ukraine, according to combined estimates from the Council on Foreign Relations, the South Korean National Intelligence Service, and Ukrainian military intelligence. This is no longer a rumor, an allegation, or an extrapolation — it is a documented fact, acknowledged by multiple governments and verified by dozens of independent sources. What that deployment reveals goes far beyond one-off military support for Putin: it is the profound transformation of North Korean military capability, financed by the blood of Kim Jong-un's soldiers deployed on a battlefield where they are learning twenty-first-century warfare.

In parallel, between 12,000 and 20,000 North Korean workers are deployed in Russian drone factories, primarily at the Alabuga Special Economic Zone in Tatarstan, 1,200 kilometers from the front. Those workers assemble Geran-2 drones — Russia's clones of the Iranian Shaheds — that strike Ukrainian cities every night. They earn $2.50 per hour working shifts of at least 12 hours. They are acquiring industrial expertise in drone manufacturing that Pyongyang will reclaim. And they perfectly illustrate the full arc of Moscow-Pyongyang cooperation: soldiers for combat, workers for the factory, technologies in exchange for cannon fodder.

The logic of the Kim-Putin deal: a cold calculation

The partnership between Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin is not founded on ideology or affection. It is founded on a mutual calculation of short-term benefits. Russia gets cheap industrial labor, expendable infantry, and millions of 152mm artillery shells — North Korea has delivered more than 12 million projectiles, according to the South Korean Defence Intelligence Agency. North Korea gets foreign currency, real combat training that its own exercises cannot provide, and technology transfers — drones, ballistic missiles, air defense — that thirty years of sanctions had not managed to completely block. It is a voluntary servitude arrangement between two regimes that share nothing except contempt for international rules.

North Korean soldiers in Kursk: the toll of a deadly deployment

Sent into drone hell without prior training

The first North Korean soldiers deployed in the Russian region of Kursk in the fall of 2024 suffered catastrophic initial losses. According to sources reported by BFBS Forces News and relayed by United24 Media in February 2026, North Korean troops had virtually no experience of drone warfare — not of FPV drones, fiber-optic drones, or the long-range reconnaissance drones that have defined the Ukrainian battlefield since 2022. Their infantry tactics were those of an army trained for Cold War-era conflict. The result was predictable.

Of the 14,000 troops sent to Russia, at least 6,000 were killed, according to estimates from the British Ministry of Defence and South Korean intelligence confirmed as of March 2026. A casualty rate of approximately 43% in a matter of months. To put that figure in context: American losses during the Vietnam War, over ten years, represented approximately 3.3% of deployed forces. North Korean soldiers were consumed at an industrial rate that even the high Russian loss standards make exceptional. Some soldiers reportedly committed suicide to avoid capture — only two have been confirmed as prisoners of war by Ukraine.

What they are learning despite the losses

But the survivors are learning. And that is precisely what Pyongyang planned. North Korean soldiers integrated into Russian military formations since early 2026 occupy specialized roles — artillery operators, reconnaissance drone operators, fire support coordinators. They are learning modern hybrid warfare: the coordination between infantry, drones, and artillery that the North Korean army had never practiced in real combat conditions.

Approximately 3,000 soldiers have already been repatriated to North Korea, according to estimates, to serve as instructors — transmitting to Kim Jong-un's armed forces the lessons of the Ukrainian battlefield. Zelenskyy said it explicitly: "It is extremely dangerous that they are acquiring knowledge of modern hybrid warfare." That is not rhetoric. It is a strategic assessment of the ongoing capability shift within the North Korean military.

Alabuga: the drone factory built on North Korean labor

The Tatarstan special economic zone as a war industrial system

The Alabuga Special Economic Zone, in the city of Yelabuga in Tatarstan, has become the most documented symbol of Russia's war industrial machine. That is where Geran-2 and Geran-3 drones are assembled — the clones of the Iranian Shaheds-136 that strike Ukraine every night. Ukraine's Defense Intelligence Directorate estimated in May 2025 that production had reached 2,700 Shahed drones per month — approximately the total production for all of 2023. In 2026, Russia plans to produce 60,000 long-range drones and 50,000 decoy drones, according to the Ukrainian DIU.

To meet those production targets, Alabuga has aggressively recruited abroad. Young women from Africa, Latin America, and Asia, recruited through the Alabuga Start program with promises of education and vocational training, found themselves assembling drones under conditions that the Foundation for Defense of Democracies described as forced labor and human trafficking. Russian minors as young as 14 were also recruited. And at the top of that forced recruitment: the 12,000 North Korean workers planned per Ukrainian intelligence (HUR), whose logistical details were finalized at meetings between Russian officials and the North Korean Jihyang Technology Trade Company in October 2025.

What North Korean workers bring back to Pyongyang

North Korean workers at Alabuga will work shifts of at least 12 hours for $2.50 an hour. The estimated total income for 12,000 workers over a year, according to calculations by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, would be approximately $113 million — the majority of which will be captured by the North Korean state rather than remitted to the workers. But money is only part of the exchange. The real capital, for Pyongyang, is the technical expertise those workers will acquire in manufacturing long-range attack drones. When they return to North Korea, they will constitute the skilled workforce for domestic North Korean drone production — which will target South Korea.

The technology transfer: drones, missiles, and Pantsir for Kim Jong-un

What Russia has given in exchange for soldiers and workers

The agreement between Moscow and Pyongyang is not unilateral. Russia has provided North Korea with weapons systems and technology transfers of considerable value. According to Kyrylo Budanov, chief of Ukrainian military intelligence, Russia has deployed Pantsir-S1 air defense systems in Pyongyang — operational units already in service, with Russian specialists training North Korean personnel on their operation. It has also provided North Korea with the equipment, technical know-how, and production capacity to manufacture Shahed-type attack drones — not the finished drones, but the means to produce them domestically.

In June 2025, Budanov confirmed that agreements had been reached to "create production capabilities for Garpiya and Geran-type UAVs on North Korean territory." He added that this "will certainly change the military balance in the region between North Korea and South Korea." Russia has also cooperated with North Korea on improving its ballistic missiles, according to Interfax-Ukraine. Missiles that, improved with Russian expertise, can strike any South Korean city with enhanced precision.

Kim Jong-un supervises his own AI-guided kamikaze drones

In March 2025, Kim Jong-un personally supervised a test flight of new AI-equipped suicide drones capable of "tracking and surveilling various strategic targets." North Korea's official KCNA agency reported that Kim was planning to increase production capabilities. Experts such as James Patton Rogers of the Cornell Brooks Tech Policy Institute said the design had likely benefited from Russian and Iranian assistance. North Korea is presenting a drone that resembles the Russian Lancet-3 — that is not a coincidence; it is a technology transfer.

Seoul's response: 500,000 "drone warriors" by 2029

Defense Minister Ahn Gyu-back's announcement: every soldier as a drone operator

South Korea responded to that reality with military ambition commensurate with the threat. On June 26, 2026, South Korea's National Defense announced a plan to train 500,000 "drone warriors" — the entire armed forces strength — by 2029. According to Defense Minister Ahn Gyu-back: "Drones must no longer be equipment used only by specialized units. They must become a universal combat tool." The armed forces plan to deploy approximately 60,000 drones across all service branches by 2029, with 11,000 systems deployed in 2026 alone.

The plan includes the rapid acquisition of more than 20,000 low-cost expendable drones, the deployment of AI-guided drone swarm systems, and the acquisition of loitering munitions. South Korea will build its drones using domestic components only — a decision that eliminates vulnerabilities linked to foreign, particularly Chinese, supply chains. Laser and microwave anti-drone systems will also be developed. That is a modern asymmetric warfare doctrine that directly incorporates the lessons of the Ukrainian conflict.

What Ukraine learned that Seoul is integrating

South Korea has been watching the Ukrainian conflict since 2022 with particular attention — not only because it is an indirect arms supplier, but because it sees itself in this war. A vibrant democracy, bordering an aggressive autocracy armed with massive weapons, confronting the question of how to defend itself with limited resources against a determined adversary seeking to attack its infrastructure. The FPV drones that changed the nature of Ukrainian combat, the long-range attack drones striking logistics chains, the anti-drone drones — all of it is being studied by military planners in Seoul.

The financial estimate: what the cooperation is worth to Pyongyang

$14.4 billion in estimated total benefit

South Korean intelligence services estimated at $14.4 billion the total benefit to North Korea from its military cooperation with Russia. That figure includes revenues from workers captured by the state, payments for delivered artillery shells and munitions, the value of received technology transfers, and indirect economic benefits from access to Russian markets. For a country whose GDP is estimated at between $16 and $25 billion (exact data being very uncertain given the regime's opacity), those revenues represent a substantial fraction of the national economy.

Those revenues are strategically transformative. They allow Kim Jong-un to fund his ballistic missile program, his nuclear tests, and now the construction of a domestic drone industry — all without depending on supply networks subject to international sanctions. Russia has effectively become, in practice, a massive circumvention of the sanctions regime that the international community took twenty years to build.

The 36,000 Russian visas granted to North Koreans in 2025

Russian newspaper Vedomosti reported that Russia had granted 36,000 visas to North Korean nationals in 2025 — four times more than in 2024. That figure far exceeds estimates for workers in drone factories alone. It confirms a North Korean presence in Russia spanning multiple sectors: construction in occupied Ukrainian territories, infrastructure work in Russia proper, and probably specialized personnel in even more sensitive sectors. North Korea is becoming a major economic partner of Russia — a partner on whom the Russian war economy depends.

Ukraine produces its own drones while Russia puts North Korean workers in its factories

The industrial asymmetry that defines this war

While Russia uses North Korean workers to increase its Geran drone production, Ukraine is building its own drone industry from scratch — under bombardment, with its own engineers, financed by a combination of international aid and national resources. In 2022, the Ukrainian defense industry represented a fraction of Russian industrial power. In 2026, it is estimated at $50 billion in capacity — a tenfold increase in four years, according to Euromaidan Press data. Drones like the Peklo — a Ukrainian jet-powered drone that inspired the Russian Geran-5 — are produced in underground factories whose coordinates are unknown to Moscow.

That symmetrical but opposite trajectory is one of the deep ironies of this war: Russia uses North Korean slave labor to maintain its drone production tempo; Ukraine uses national innovation to create drones that Russia then copies. The Russian Geran-5 resembles the Ukrainian Peklo — that is proof that even in industrial war effort, Ukraine innovates and Russia imitates.

What this means for the sustainability of the Russian war effort

Russia's dependence on North Korean workers and North Korean munitions reveals a reality that Russian propaganda erases: the Russian war economy cannot sustain itself alone. Without North Korean shells, artillery stockpiles would be insufficient. Without drones assembled by workers recruited under false pretenses, nightly strikes on Ukraine would be less intense. That dependence on North Korea is structural — and it is a strategic vulnerability, because anything that pressures the Moscow-Pyongyang axis has a direct effect on Russian operational capacity in Ukraine.

What the Russia-North Korea-China-Iran axis means for the world order

A coalition of revisionist states strengthening each other

The Moscow-Pyongyang cooperation cannot be analyzed in isolation. It is part of a broader network that NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte explicitly identified on June 30, 2026: Russia maintains "ongoing" cooperation with China, Iran, and North Korea. Those four states share a common objective — eroding the liberal international order — and sustain each other in pursuing it. China provides dual-use electronic components. Iran provided the original Shahed design. North Korea provides shells and labor. That is a war supply chain that bypasses Western sanctions.

That coalition is not formalized in a treaty. It has no unified command. But it is real and functional, because each member finds advantage in it. And Ukraine, in that geography, is the most visible front of that test of the international order. If Russia wins — or merely survives long enough to exhaust Western will — that is a victory for the entire coalition. Every North Korean drone striking Kyiv is also a test that Beijing is watching to calibrate its own ambitions over Taiwan.

What the international community has not yet done

North Korea is violating UN Security Council resolutions by supplying arms and soldiers to Russia. Those resolutions exist, but their enforcement is blocked by the Russian and Chinese veto. Additional sanctions imposed by the United States, the European Union, and their allies have limited effectiveness against a country already under massive sanctions for decades. That is not total powerlessness — sanctions restrict Pyongyang's access to foreign technologies — but it is insufficient to break the alliance.

North Korean prisoners captured by Ukraine: a window into a closed world

Two prisoners and an invitation from Seoul

Only two North Korean soldiers have been captured alive by Ukrainian forces since the deployment began. Two. Out of thousands of men deployed. That rarity of prisoners confirms accounts of soldiers reportedly ordered to commit suicide rather than be captured — thereby preventing information about the deployment from being disclosed or soldiers from seeking political asylum. North Korea manages its human losses as it manages everything else: with total information control.

On June 23, 2026, South Korea announced it would accept all North Korean soldiers captured by Ukraine who did not wish to return to the North. That is a strong political gesture: Seoul offers an alternative to Pyongyang's soldiers, implicitly recognizing their status as victims of a regime that used them as cannon fodder in a war that is not theirs. Their testimony would also be a valuable intelligence source on the real state of the North Korean military, its equipment, its doctrine.

What prisoners revealed about Kim Jong-un's army

Statements from the two captured North Korean prisoners confirmed significant capability gaps: they did not know where they were deployed, had not been informed they would be fighting in Russia, and had virtually no training for the drone warfare that defines the contemporary battlefield. Those testimonies corroborate the assessment of high losses — soldiers technically competent in conventional warfare but overwhelmed by the modernity of the Ukrainian conflict. They also reveal the state of morale: men sent to die in a war whose nature was concealed from them, for a regime that explained nothing.

Drone manufacturing in North Korea: the next phase

Geran factories on North Korean territory

The next phase of Moscow-Pyongyang drone cooperation no longer concerns only North Korean labor in Russia — it concerns autonomous production in North Korea. Budanov confirmed in June 2025 that agreements had been reached to establish Geran- and Garpiya-type drone production capabilities on North Korean territory. That means North Korea is building its own long-range attack drone factory, potentially capable of striking any South Korean city at scale.

If that production materializes, North Korean drones could be used both against Ukraine — exported to Russia — and against South Korea. Budanov himself said that this "will certainly change the military balance in the region." That is a warning from the military intelligence chief of a country at war — a man accustomed to stating what he knows, not what he supposes. The risk is real, it is being built, and it will materialize in the coming years if nothing is done to stop it.

The line between Kyiv and Seoul

What is being built at Alabuga and in North Korean factories is a reality that directly connects the war in Ukraine to security in East Asia. Seoul has understood this, hence its program of 500,000 drone warriors and its active monitoring of the North Korean deployment in Russia. What is happening on the Ukrainian front is not a distant European affair — it is a laboratory whose lessons and technologies flow directly to the Korean Peninsula. Ukraine is fighting for itself. But it is also fighting, in a very real sense, for the security of democracies that do not yet have troops on that front.

Sanctions: why they are not enough — and what could complement them

What the current sanctions regime can and cannot do

American sanctions on the Alabuga Special Economic Zone and several of its subsidiaries have been imposed by the U.S. Treasury. Other countries followed with their own restrictions. But Alabuga is still running. Drone production figures keep rising. The reason is simple: sanctions punish named entities, but Alabuga's supply chain is dispersed across dozens of countries under dozens of different names. Western-made electronic components continue to arrive via third-party intermediaries. North Korean labor arrives via government agreements that sanctions cannot directly block.

What sanctions can do is make every component harder and more expensive to obtain — increasing total production costs and slowing, without stopping, the expansion. That is useful, but insufficient. The complementary option that Ukraine has activated — direct strikes on Alabuga — is geographically limited. The site is 1,200 kilometers from the front. Ukrainian strikes hit the facilities in 2024 and 2025, but damage was quickly repaired.

Pressure on Pyongyang through regional partners

China is the only actor capable of exerting real pressure on North Korea — Beijing is Pyongyang's primary economic partner, providing between 80 and 90% of its imports. But China has no interest in destabilizing North Korea — a buffer state, however problematic, is preferable for Beijing to a reunified peninsula under American influence. China's calculation is therefore to tolerate the Pyongyang-Moscow cooperation while maintaining its own relations with Seoul to preserve economic ties. That is a strategic ambiguity that China manages with sophistication — and one that Western democracies have not found a way to dismantle.

The threat to Asia's balance: what Seoul must confront by 2030

A North Korea transformed in terms of technology and capability

By 2030, if current trajectories are maintained, North Korea will have a long-range attack drone industrial capacity built with Russian assistance, a military battle-hardened in modern hybrid warfare through its deployment in Russia, and a nuclear and ballistic missile program improved by technical cooperation with Moscow. That transformation is not hypothetical. It is underway, documented, and its pace is faster than the international diplomatic response.

For South Korea, that means the threat of 2030 will be qualitatively different from that of 2020. Not just more ballistic missiles — but also drone swarms capable of saturating air defenses, AI-guided drones that Seoul's intelligence will struggle to detect and counter. The program of 500,000 drone warriors is a relevant response. But it will not be sufficient alone — it must form part of an integrated defense architecture, with allies, multi-layered interception systems, and an operational doctrine that fully incorporates Ukrainian lessons.

What the war in Ukraine tells South Korea about its own defense

Ukraine has shown that a democracy can resist a larger invading power if it has the will, the allies, and the appropriate technologies. It has also shown that drone defense is an industrial war of endurance — interceptors cheaper than the drones being intercepted are needed, in sufficient quantities, produced fast enough to maintain the tempo. South Korea is reading those lessons. Its integrated defense plan for 2029, published before the Ankara NATO summit, is a direct response to those realities. The question is whether political decisions and budgets will match the pace of the threat.

What Seoul is asking its allies — and what NATO should answer

Seoul's requests at the June 2026 summit

South Korea has tracked the North Korean deployment in Russia with sustained attention from the start. It has shared intelligence with NATO partners, provided Ukraine with information on North Korean soldier strengths and capabilities, and developed diplomatic positions demanding formal condemnation of Pyongyang for violating Security Council resolutions. In June 2026, in the corridors of the preparatory summit ahead of Ankara, Seoul asked its allies to formulate a joint statement on Russia-North Korea cooperation and its implications for Asian regional security.

That request is legitimate. NATO has a direct interest in the Moscow-Pyongyang axis not consolidating further. Every additional drone that Alabuga produces thanks to North Korean workers is one more drone striking Ukraine. Every ballistic missile that Russia helps North Korea improve is an increased threat to American allies in the Asia-Pacific. Security in Europe and security in East Asia are not separate problems. They are two manifestations of the same challenge: how democracies collectively resist revisionist powers that cooperate with one another.

What NATO can do — and what it is not yet doing

NATO has no direct jurisdiction over North Korea or the Korean Peninsula. But it can formulate policy positions, coordinate sanctions, and above all formally acknowledge that Russia-North Korea cooperation is a transatlantic security issue, not merely a regional one. It can also facilitate intelligence sharing between its members and South Korea, Japan, and Australia — the Pacific democracies directly facing threats from that cooperation. That informal coordination already partially exists. Making it more formal and more operational is a political decision that the Ankara summit could adopt.

The human dimension: Alabuga's workers as forgotten victims

Workers recruited under false pretenses in a factory of death

Amid geopolitical analyses and strategic calculations, we must name what Alabuga's workers are living. The young women from Africa, Latin America, and Asia recruited by the Alabuga Start program — presented as an "educational opportunity" — find themselves assembling drone components in factories under constant surveillance, with facial recognition cameras, non-disclosure agreements, financial penalties for leaving the program, and conditions that the FDD has documented as constituting forced labor. Women have reported chemical burns on their skin, repeated nosebleeds, exhausting working conditions. One described recruits as "treated like donkeys."

Those women — recruited in 2025 from at least 12 countries in Latin America and several African countries — have no public visibility. Their names are unknown. Their suffering is invisible behind drone production figures. But their presence at Alabuga is not an anomaly — it is the system itself. The Russian war machine rests on the exploitation of vulnerable populations, recruited by deception, unable to leave. That is the true face of Putin's war industry: not a glorious national mobilization, but a globalized exploitation of human vulnerability in the service of terror.

North Korean workers as a distinct category

North Korean workers occupy a separate box in that picture. They are not recruited under false pretenses — they probably know they are going to work in a factory. But they have no choice: in North Korea, working abroad is a state decision, not an individual one. Their wages do not belong to them — they are captured by the North Korean state, which remits only a minimal fraction. They are deployed as industrial resources of a regime that owns them. Even when the work is real and conditions less violent than for other recruits, it remains a form of state slavery — validated by Russia, invisible to the outside world.

Conclusion: the dictators' alliance demands a democratic response

What this complete arc reveals

The story this article tells is that of a complete arc: North Korean soldiers sent to die in Russia to finance and train Kim Jong-un's army; North Korean workers assembling drones at Alabuga to strengthen Russia's terror machine against Ukraine; technology transfers that will transform the threat North Korea poses to South Korea; and a total benefit of $14.4 billion for Pyongyang from a war it did not start but that is paying it considerably. That arc is not the unforeseen consequence of a regional conflict. It is the deliberate result of a strategic alliance between two regimes that believe their survival depends on weakening the international order.

The democratic response must be equal to that reality. Support Ukraine until Russia can no longer afford the war. Sanction the North Korean supply network more aggressively. Help South Korea build its defense against an increased drone threat. Exert pressure on China to stop ignoring its neighbor's sanctions violations. And document, publish, explain — because the first front of this war is that of understanding. People who do not know what Kim Jong-un is building in Pyongyang with Putin's help are most vulnerable to the political indifference these regimes count on provoking.

What South Korea says to Ukraine — and Ukraine to South Korea

There is an implicit message in Seoul's gesture of welcoming North Korean soldiers captured by Ukraine: we are watching you, we support you morally, and we recognize that your war is ours in a profound sense. Ukraine, for its part, by documenting every technology transfer and every North Korean soldier on its soil, offers Seoul the most valuable intelligence on the state of Kim Jong-un's army in decades. That solidarity between two democracies bordering aggressive dictatorships is perhaps the least-commented dimension of this conflict — and one of the most important for the future.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency note

What I know and what I don't

This article is based on sources dated primarily between 2024 and July 2026: reports from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (November 2025, January 2026), reporting from the Kyiv Independent, Militarnyi, Euromaidan Press, and United24 Media, and public statements from Kyrylo Budanov, the South Korean National Intelligence Service, and British MI5. Loss figures (6,000 dead) and deployed troop numbers (14,000–15,000) are estimates from multiple governmental sources and must be read as such. The $14.4 billion total benefit estimate comes from South Korean intelligence. I have no internal sources in Pyongyang or at Alabuga.

My editorial position

I consider North Korea a serious strategic threat — not only to South Korea, but to Asian regional stability and, through its ties to Russia, to the war in Ukraine. I am pro-Ukraine and pro-security in East Asia in the sense that I believe authoritarian regimes that ignore international rules must not be rewarded. I acknowledge the limits of my knowledge given North Korea's internal opacity — it is one of the most difficult regimes in the world to analyze.

Sources

Primary sources

Foundation for Defense of Democracies — North Korean workers to make Russian drones, Ukrainian intel says — November 18, 2025

Kyiv Independent — Russia plans to import 12,000 North Koreans to work in its massive Shahed drone plant, HUR says — November 14, 2025

Militarnyi — South Korea Plans to Train 500,000 Troops to Operate Drones — June 26, 2026

Interfax-Ukraine — Russia plans to 'import' 12,000 'shahed collectors' from North Korea — GUR — November 14, 2025

Secondary sources

Euromaidan Press — Russia is training North Korea's future army: 3000 North Korean soldiers return home as war instructors — February 4, 2026

Ukrainska Pravda — Russia's high-security economic zone: how Alabuga, the country's main drone factory, operates — May 26, 2026

Foundation for Defense of Democracies — Russia Recruits Young Migrant Women from Latin America to Build Iranian Drones — January 8, 2026