Kim Jong Un, the dealer trading his soldiers for Russian missiles

Introduction: a cynical transaction on a national scale

July 4: a dictator inspects his fleet

On July 4, 2026, Kim Jong Un oversaw a strategic cruise missile test as well as evaluations of anti-ship, anti-submarine, and air defense systems aboard the destroyer Kang Kon. This military display comes as thousands of North Korean soldiers continue fighting and dying on Russian soil, in the Kursk oblast, in exchange for military technology Moscow transfers to Pyongyang.

This scene, seemingly a purely military matter, actually reveals the scale of a macabre bargain: North Korean human lives traded for technological advances that directly strengthen the strike capability of the world's most isolated regime.

Kim calls his own navy the weakest link

Kim Jong Un described the North Korean navy as his country's weakest military branch, ordering that combat trials of the Kang Kon be completed and the ship formally commissioned within two months. He also announced plans to build two destroyers a year for five years, plus even larger vessels of 10,000 tons.

This naval ambition, financed in part by Russian technology transfers obtained in exchange for North Korean blood spilled in Ukraine, starkly illustrates the transactional nature of the alliance between Pyongyang and Moscow: this is not ideological solidarity — it is barter.

Eleven thousand soldiers sacrificed in the Kursk oblast

A massive deployment documented by South Korean intelligence

According to South Korea's National Intelligence Service, cited by the Yonhap news agency, nearly 11,000 North Korean soldiers were stationed in Russia's Kursk oblast at the start of 2026, including roughly 10,000 combat troops and 1,000 military engineers. This deployment, one of the largest of a foreign army alongside Russian forces since the war began, confirms the scale of North Korea's commitment.

These troops were sent starting in 2024 to support Russian forces after Ukraine's August 2024 incursion into the Kursk region, which had allowed Kyiv to seize roughly 1,300 square kilometers of Russian territory, a bold operation that had caught Moscow off guard.

Six thousand casualties, a number that demands attention

According to British military intelligence, roughly 6,000 North Korean soldiers have been killed or wounded fighting in Kursk, a considerable casualty rate relative to the size of the deployed contingent. South Korean intelligence summed up this reality with clinical coldness: "Despite 6,000 casualties, the North Korean army has acquired modern combat tactics and battlefield data, as well as weapons system modernization through Russian technical assistance."

This official statement, which treats thousands of dead and wounded as a mere line item in a technology-acquisition balance sheet, sums up on its own the nature of the pact struck between Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin: North Korean soldiers are not allies in the traditional sense — they are currency.

Spring 2026, a military turning point on the front

A counteroffensive that drove Ukraine out of Kursk

In the spring of 2026, the combination of Russian forces and roughly 12,000 North Korean soldiers made it possible to launch a counteroffensive that pushed Ukrainian forces out of nearly all the Russian territory they had captured during the August 2024 incursion. This reconquest, directly aided by North Korea's human contribution, illustrates the real tactical impact of this alliance on the course of the conflict.

This counteroffensive represented a significant strategic setback for Kyiv, which had counted on holding this Russian enclave as potential leverage in future negotiations. The loss of this territory partially weakened Ukraine's negotiating position, a direct cost of North Korean intervention.

A bitter lesson for Western strategists

This episode also served as a lesson for Western military analysts, who had largely underestimated Pyongyang's capacity and willingness to deploy combat troops so far from its own territory, in a conflict that ostensibly involved no direct North Korean national interest.

This initial underestimation has since been corrected by several Western intelligence services, which now closely monitor the evolving military cooperation between Pyongyang and Moscow, aware it could extend to other geopolitical theaters in the future.

What North Korea gets in return

Missile and air defense technology

In exchange for this bloodshed, Pyongyang receives significant technology transfers from Moscow in ballistic missiles, air defense, and now, as the July 4 tests demonstrate, advanced naval systems including cruise missiles and anti-submarine capabilities previously beyond the reach of North Korea's military program.

These technological advances represent a major qualitative leap for a North Korean military historically cut off from international military innovation chains due to sanctions imposed for decades by the United Nations and Western powers in response to the regime's nuclear program.

A regime consolidating its domestic legitimacy

Beyond direct military gains, this cooperation with Russia also allows Kim Jong Un to bolster his domestic legitimacy by presenting his regime as a respected strategic partner of a major world power, rather than a totally isolated pariah state on the international stage.

This dimension of domestic propaganda should not be underestimated: for a regime that tightly controls the information available to its population, every image of military cooperation with Moscow serves to justify the sacrifices imposed on the North Korean people in the name of a supposedly rediscovered greatness.

Munitions and shells, the other side of the barter

A logistics flow documented since 2023

Beyond combat troops, North Korea has been supplying Russia with considerable quantities of artillery shells and ballistic missiles since 2023, a logistics flow several Western intelligence services have documented through satellite imagery analysis and cross-border rail movements between the two countries.

This munitions support has allowed the Russian military to sustain a steady rate of artillery fire on the Ukrainian front at a time when its own industrial production was struggling to fully meet the demands of a prolonged war of attrition, a decisive logistical boost during several phases of the conflict.

A regime emptying its own strategic stockpiles

This level of munitions transfer raises questions about the real state of North Korean strategic stockpiles, with some military analysts wondering whether the regime can simultaneously maintain its own deterrent capability against South Korea while feeding the Russian war effort on such a large scale.

This question remains difficult to settle with certainty, as North Korea remains one of the most opaque regimes in the world regarding communication about its actual military capabilities, which complicates any precise assessment of the long-term sustainability of this cooperation.

The international reaction, between condemnation and helplessness

Condemnations that stop nothing

Western capitals and South Korea have repeatedly condemned this military cooperation between Pyongyang and Moscow, calling it a flagrant violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions banning any arms transfer involving North Korea. These condemnations have so far had no visible effect on the continuation of this alliance.

Russia's systematic veto at the Security Council blocks any new binding international sanctions against this cooperation, illustrating the structural limits of the multilateral system when facing powers that deliberately choose to ignore international norms they themselves once helped establish.

Seoul, on the front line of concern

South Korea watches this cooperation with particular concern, aware that every technological advance Pyongyang gains through Russia directly alters the military balance on the Korean peninsula, against a backdrop of tensions between the two Koreas that have already run high for decades.

This South Korean concern partly explains Seoul's recent intensification of military cooperation with its Western partners, notably through increased participation in multinational exercises like RIMPAC, a direct response to North Korea's technological rise facilitated by Moscow.

The fate of North Korean soldiers, an invisible tragedy

Fighters without a voice or recognition

Unlike Russian or Ukrainian soldiers, whose losses receive media coverage, even if partial and contested, North Korean soldiers who fell in Ukraine remain largely invisible, their fate never officially acknowledged by Pyongyang, which releases no casualty statistics to its own population.

This total absence of transparency means thousands of North Korean families likely still don't know today what really happened to relatives sent to fight in a country whose existence on a map they probably don't even know, given how total the information control remains under Kim Jong Un's regime.

A total dehumanization of sacrifice

This invisibility is not a mere administrative oversight: it is a deliberate policy of a regime that treats its own soldiers as disposable resources, whose deaths deserve neither public recognition nor transparent compensation for the families involved, unlike practices observed in most other armies engaged in this conflict.

This reality, documented indirectly by South Korean and Western intelligence services through analysis of troop movements and estimated casualties, illustrates the scale of the human price Kim Jong Un is willing to make his own people pay for technological and diplomatic gains.

Kim's naval ambition, power projection or survival

Two destroyers a year, an ambitious goal

Kim Jong Un's announcement to build two destroyers a year for five consecutive years represents a considerable industrial goal for a country subject to severe economic sanctions for decades, theoretically limiting its access to the materials and technology needed for such sustained naval production.

This ambition cannot reasonably be explained without Russia's technological, and probably material, contribution, confirming that military cooperation between the two countries extends far beyond the Ukrainian conflict alone, becoming a structural, lasting transformation of North Korean military capability.

The Kang Kon, a symbol of ambition and fragility

The destroyer Kang Kon, subject of the July 4 tests, had previously partially capsized during its launch ceremony, an incident repaired the previous year that publicly revealed certain persistent technical limitations of North Korea's naval industry, despite the Russian support now available.

Its sister ship, the Choe Hyon, at 5,000 tons, was commissioned at the end of the previous month, marking a further step in this North Korean naval buildup that, if fully realized, would meaningfully shift the regional maritime balance in Northeast Asia.

An alliance that worries far beyond Ukraine

The precedent Taiwan fears

This military cooperation between Pyongyang and Moscow also fuels concern in Taiwan, where authorities closely watch how authoritarian regimes are now coordinating their military efforts, a dynamic that could foreshadow similar support from North Korea or Russia to China in the event of a conflict in the Taiwan Strait.

This fear of a coordinated authoritarian axis, encompassing Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, increasingly shapes Western strategic analysis, which no longer views these four regimes as isolated threats but as actors likely to support one another against the Western-led international order.

A test for Western cohesion

Faced with this growing authoritarian coordination, Western partners, from the United States to Japan to South Korea and the European Union, must now scale up their own security cooperation to a comparable level, or risk being strategically outpaced by an increasingly integrated adversarial alliance, both militarily and technologically.

This need for adaptation partly explains the recent intensification of Western multinational military exercises, as well as the strengthening of bilateral and multilateral partnerships designed to counter this emerging authoritarian axis dynamic.

Western diplomacy against a North Korean wall

No effective negotiating channel

Unlike other geopolitical files where diplomatic channels, however limited, allow at least minimal dialogue, North Korea remains almost completely closed to any Western attempt at direct dialogue over its military cooperation with Russia, a diplomatic isolation that considerably limits the response options available to Western powers.

This absence of direct diplomatic leverage pushes Western capitals to favor indirect responses, notably through strengthened sanctions on North Korean financial networks or increased support for South Korea, rather than hoping for direct negotiation with a regime historically resistant to any concession.

A deadlock that could last for years

This diplomatic deadlock is likely to persist as long as Kim Jong Un's regime keeps drawing tangible technological and political benefits from its cooperation with Moscow, without facing consequences severe enough to justify a strategic change of course on its part.

This reality imposes a form of strategic resignation on Western powers, forced to acknowledge the limits of their influence over a regime that has made permanent defiance of the international order a central component of its own political survival for decades.

What this alliance reveals about Putin's calculation

A costly but indispensable partner

For Vladimir Putin, the alliance with Pyongyang represents a pragmatic strategic choice rather than an ideological one: facing the depletion of his own human and material reserves after more than four years of war, the Kremlin needs every additional soldier and every additional shell North Korea can supply, whatever the technological price paid in return.

This calculation reveals a form of Russian strategic vulnerability rarely admitted publicly by the Kremlin: a country that claims to rival major Western powers now must rely on one of the poorest, most isolated regimes on the planet to sustain its war effort, an implicit admission of the real limits of Russian military power.

A price paid that could backfire on Moscow

By transferring advanced military technology to North Korea, Russia is, over the long term, strengthening an unpredictable regime located in a highly sensitive region, a risky bet whose consequences could one day turn against Russia's own strategic interests in Northeast Asia.

This risk, already flagged by several Western analysts, illustrates the limits of an alliance built on tactical urgency rather than long-term strategic convergence between two regimes that, aside from their shared opposition to the West, share few truly aligned interests.

Beijing's silence, a quiet accomplice to this traffic

A border that stays open to trade

China, North Korea's main trading partner and historic ally, watches this military cooperation between Pyongyang and Moscow without ever publicly condemning it, a passivity that indirectly facilitates the continuation of this trade in human lives and munitions across the Sino-North Korean border, essential to the already fragile economy of Kim Jong Un's regime.

This absence of Chinese condemnation is not trivial: it fits into a broader logic in which Beijing, Moscow, and Pyongyang share a common interest in weakening Western influence, even if each pursues that goal through its own methods and priorities.

An axis that coordinates without proclaiming it

Western analysts increasingly agree in describing this configuration as an informal axis among authoritarian regimes, with no unified formal treaty but a convergence of interests strong enough to worry Western capitals about a possible deeper future coordination in the face of simultaneous crises across several world regions.

This absence of a formal treaty in no way diminishes the operational reality of this coordination, as already demonstrated by the constant flow of munitions, soldiers, and now naval technology between North Korea and Russia, under Beijing's silent but consenting gaze.

The military lessons Moscow also draws from Pyongyang

An underestimated North Korean know-how

While Western attention naturally focuses on the technology Russia transfers to North Korea, the exchange also runs the other way: some military analysts believe Moscow also benefits from North Korean expertise in low-cost mass production of artillery and ballistic missiles, an industrial know-how Pyongyang developed under decades of international sanctions.

This dimension of the exchange, less publicly documented than Russian technology transfers to North Korea, suggests the alliance between the two regimes rests on a more complex reciprocity than a simple one-way barter of human lives for technology.

A cooperation that could deepen further

Some experts fear this technical and industrial cooperation will continue to deepen in the months ahead, notably if the war in Ukraine drags on and Russian needs for additional munitions and combat personnel remain high, further reinforcing the mutual dependence between the two regimes.

This growing dependence could, over time, durably reshape the balance of power in Northeast Asia, well beyond the duration of the current Ukrainian conflict alone, a scenario Western powers must now factor into their long-term strategic planning.

The uncomfortable comparison to Russian mercenaries

Wagner, a precedent that illuminates the present

The transactional logic behind sending North Korean troops to Russia recalls, in certain respects, the model already used by the paramilitary group Wagner, which recruited fighters under similar conditions of human lives traded for payment or political benefits for its sponsors, before its founder met disgrace and death.

This continuity between Wagner's practices and those now observed with North Korean troops suggests the Kremlin has, over the course of this war, developed a genuine doctrine of outsourcing human sacrifice, whether through Russian mercenaries or foreign soldiers supplied by allied regimes seeking strategic payback.

A dehumanization that runs through the entire Russian war system

This outsourcing doctrine reveals a broader approach to how Moscow conducts the war, where preserving its own conventional Russian forces relies on systematic use of auxiliary forces, whether mercenary, Chechen, or now North Korean, whose losses structurally attract less domestic political attention in Russia.

This strategy, however militarily effective in the short term for Putin, illustrates the deeply instrumental relationship the Russian regime maintains with human life, whether Russian, North Korean, or Ukrainian, a common thread running through this entire war since it began.

Conclusion: the human price of a limitless barter

A transaction that will continue as long as it benefits both regimes

The military alliance between Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin illustrates, in its most brutal form, the transactional nature of relations between authoritarian regimes: North Korean human lives traded for Russian military technology, with no regard for the real human cost imposed on the families and soldiers involved. This dynamic will likely continue as long as it serves the immediate interests of both leaders.

A warning for the West

This cooperation should remind Western democracies that the war in Ukraine no longer pits only Kyiv against Moscow, but is now part of a broader dynamic of coordination among authoritarian regimes, whose consequences will extend far beyond Ukrainian territory alone if not taken seriously starting now.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency note

Who I am and my declared biases

I sign this piece as an engaged columnist, not as a neutral observer. I believe the West must remain the strategic center of gravity of the free world and that Russia, North Korea, Iran, and China represent coordinated threats to international security. I consider Kim Jong Un's regime one of the most cynical in the world in how it treats its own citizens.

What I don't know, and my method

I do not claim to know the exact number of North Korean soldiers currently deployed in Russia, nor the full detail of the technologies transferred by Moscow to Pyongyang. This analysis relies exclusively on published intelligence reports, official statements, and verifiable journalistic sources, with no invention and no speculation presented as established fact.

Sources

Primary sources

Ministry of Defence of Ukraine — official communications, July 2026

Reuters — North Korea's Kim observed naval destroyer, cruise missile launch, weapons tests, July 4, 2026

Armyinform — official Ukrainian communications, July 2026

Secondary sources

Kyiv Independent — Nearly 11,000 North Korean troops stationed in Russia's Kursk Oblast at start of 2026, 2026

Foreign Policy — analysis on Russia-North Korea cooperation, 2026

The Guardian International — coverage of North Korean military cooperation, 2026